The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

This story starts and ends with weddings. Yeah, I know, a little odd for a story about wars, but there it is.

The first wedding is my oldest daughter's in 1995, where she tells me her new hubby bought an enormous steamer trunk with some old papers and diaries in it; I should have a look.

So, I look, and I find...you see, I'm an economic historian, so what I find in that old trunk...diaries, scores of 'em. And papers and a couple of flags, some medals... It's not even my period; much of it's early 20th Century. But I look around, and look, and look...

And I'm hooked. I'm Curtis Durand, and I discovered Edmund Archer Steele in that steamer trunk.

Nobody's heard of this guy, so I have to do some research, and some more, and I have to consult experts about the stuff in the trunk. Then, my teenage daughter gets hooked on Ned Steele, much to my wife's concern. She finds historians as exciting as model railroaders...which I am, also, but she doesn't find me dull, for whatever reason.

Then, my boss says I should do something with these diaries. So do a lot of other people.

But because people know so little about this guy, I find it hard to verify the trunk's contents. He might just be some blowhard puffing himself up, dropping names like Pershing and Marshall, Somerville and Allen, Dawes and Conner and Patton ...like he met these guys.

I find he's buried not far away from where I live, at what used to be his farm. His children are alive, and so is a younger brother, and a couple of other people who knew him.

Then my oldest has her twins, and my job as a professor of American history expands and contracts, and I keep coming back to those diaries and the papers and the medals. And my daughter and I write Steele's Battalion: The Great War Diaries about this guy, who rises from Corporal to Brigadier General in less than two years because he's a genius with machine guns.

Gradually the blanks fill in, and just as gradually I think I'm too invested in all this, so I go for a cure. When I come back...

Then there's this other wedding that took place in France in 1919. How do I find out about that? Well, it's in a diary, but you'll have to read The Persistent Past: The Steele Diaries to find that out. Not gonna tell you all my secrets here and now.

The Persistent Past reintroduces Curtis Durand from The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas, and similar to that book, Curtis shows how history is recorded, one medal, one picture, one letter, one diary at a time.