One of the nice things about summer is that one isn't racing from one thing to another, juggling classes and meetings and student work. One can sit down with a book or article, follow its references, popping into libraries themselves enjoying blissful summer calm. Or one can sit down with a box of uncatalogued files from the Archives and find things nobody remembers, which link to others, and on and on, back to the library, etc.! Following tangents is the name of the game!
So, for instance, one can wander beyond the folders on Horace Kallen in
Dean Clara Mayer's files to learn about other faculty. One of them might
have a Chinese name, and turn out to have been planning a New
School-like institution in Guangzhou, before the revolution made such a
venture impossible. He might turn out to have become a member of the
faculty, although racist immigration policies required that he be
officially enrolled as a student. Or one might find a letter of Kallen's to a school president concerned at the appearance of a memoir by a past dean, which long-forgotten memoir the library of a neighboring university kindly gets for you from off-site, which sheds light on a whole bunch of open questions about the New School of the early 1960s...
