The Crazy Guy Who Invented History

Joseph Gould and the idea of oral history

Ideas have histories. All of history is fundamentally a history of ideas. Sometimes the ideas come from strange places at the margins of mental health.

It is February 27, 1916. Far away from Verdun, where a series of five attempted assaults to retake Fort Douaumont from the Germans fail at great cost in French life — far away from the English Channel, where the civilian ocean liner SS Maloja strikes a sea mine laid by a u-boat, the crew is unable to get the lifeboats into the water, and the ship sinks with 155 passengers onboard — far, far away from Persia, where the Russian Army of the Caucasus ruthlessly stamps out an uprising against foreign domination — far from the Albanian port city of Durrës, where Austro-Hungarian troops arrive today in the wake of the allied evacuation of the Serbs — a crazy man in North Dakota writes a letter to a legend.

Addressed to African American sociologist and…