H.C. Erik Midelfort

hem7e@virginia.edu

I've had a busy career teaching history and doing historical research, mainly at the University of Virginia. I'm about to retire from teaching, but my research into early German history (ca. 1500-1800) will continue. My wife and I love to travel and read aloud to each other. We are also avid lovers of art and classical music, and we go to theater when we can.

This last June I retired from teaching and came home from spending 9 months at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, where I was doing research on German radicalism around 1700 and where Anne had a job editing the early quarto editions of Hamlet. We loved Washington in so many ways. When we got home, no sooner had we settled into our old house than Anne was diagnosed with cancer in her throat -- she had to undergo 35 radiations and 3 day-long sessions of chemotherapy and has been recovering ever since September. We just heard that the most recent PET scan was all clear, so maybe this frightening chapter is now behind us and she can continue the process of recovering the ability to chew and eat again.

I think that the class of 1960 was the last class to start high school downtown in the old ECHS building, to which I bicycled when the weather was OK, cycling home for lunch too. That now seems so quaint. I had also heard rumors that guys who hated you might put vaseline on your handbrakes, so that you'd be unable to stop at the bottom of the hill and might die in a traffic collision. I never knew if it was true, but I did regularly check my tire rims and brakes to see if they had been smeared with anything slippery. I also very well remember playing on the ECHS tennis team. We weren't any good, but the practices and travel out of town did get me out of one or two late afternoon periods of school. That made up for our regularly losing seasons.

I loved Irene Berg, my Latin and English teacher. She was demanding and understanding and used what we learned in Latin to make the English easier or more interesting. Sadly, the school only taught two years of any language, and so after sophomore year, I had to go on to another language, and that was not so happy. I ended up learning German by correspondence from the University of Wisconsin, with my papers and tests graded no doubt by some poor graduate student there. But Irene Berg was fantastic.
So was Ellie Otteson (sp?), my geometry teacher. Maybe I also had her for trigonometry and solid geometry. She was funny but also crystal clear in her explanations. I still sometimes say "Whoopedee" when something goes wrong, just as she used to say.

Reading, reading aloud, travel, museums (art, historical, scientific), music (attending concerts), theater. I have played bad tennis on and off for decades and love the game of chess without ever getting better at it. This past summer I bought a kayak to take out on the small ponds, reservoirs, and rivers here in Virginia.

I don't think anything I've done has been "cool," in any sense. But I've lived several years all told in Germany and England, where I've done historical research.

In fact, right now Anne and I have just moved into the American Academy in Berlin (Germany) for a five-month stay. I'll be working on a new project called "The Fear of Free Thinking, 1650-1750," a study of why and how the Germans were so frightened at the new ideas coming out of England, the Netherlands, and France. I think that this project will be fun to work on, but right now (January 1, 2011) we are still waiting for Lufthansa to find our four suitcases. That seems to take priority over historical research right now.

Now that Anne's cancer seems to be in retreat, we plan to spend two weeks in Tuscany this April -- a time to look at art and to eat great food. Maybe I'll recover my basic ability to speak Italian, too.

We did have a fine vacation in Florence and Lucca, but now we're in snowy Berlin (January 2011), and the big surprise is that the Berliners have apparently not yet discovered the snow shovel. Walks remain unshoveled all around, and even the big stores downtown are surrounded by slush and ice. Munich does a much better job of clearing the streets. So what's this mean? That the Berliners don't believe that it snows anymore? That they would rather have someone else clear their streets and walks? Who knows?

My kids are a huge source of pride to me. I'm also proud of my wife Anne's two kids, Warren and Susan. And then I am really also proud of the several books I've published on German history or translated from German. Anyone interested could look on Amazon or in a good library's catalog.
Right now my daughter Lucy is a particular source of pride because she's plunged into working for a tough organization called Green Corps, which tries to get people to organize to save our environment. She worked against the coal powered plant at SUNY Binghamton last fall and is now starting off a two-month stint in Dallas, TX, where she's working for increased use of solar power. She's a bundle of energy and amazingly good natured.

After about 18 months of Green Corps, Lucy quit and is now (December 2010) looking for similar work in a job that would not require her to bounce all over the place all the time. What a time to be looking for a job.

It was never a hang-out, but I loved walking home through the woods when the weather was good. These were the woods that ran just north of State Street and they covered a pretty steep hill. I don't remember climbing up that hill to get to school, for that I usually walked or biked up Plank Road Hill (which was gentle), but the walk down through the woods was easy and fun.

There's too much excess.

It's not the heat but the stupidity.

Those who forget the past will be condemned to repeat it, if they are lucky.

Please wake me for meals.

Education should prepare us to think differently from the way we were taught by our families, churches and schools. I don't mean that we need to change our minds all the time, but that we need to see that our original ways of thinking and believing are not necessarily the best or only way. So we need to see how the world looks to others, try on their customs and assumptions, and lower the temperature when we are inclined to think that our way (whatever that way may be) is automatically or naturally the right way. If we believe in a "revealed truth," how is that revelation better than the revealed truths that others cite?