Remembering Alun Munslow

Abstract

Alun and I worked together closely for a dozen years, but we met in person only once, at the 2009 Board meeting in New York. Afterward we went out to dinner, together with Alun's fellow founding editor Robert Rosenstone and Robert's wife Nahid Massoud. We talked for hours and had a wonderful time. But it was just one time. To put it as Alun would, my Alun was the narrative I wrote and regularly rewrote about him, not to be confused with the man himself; however, much my narrative was grounded in his books and essays and especially our correspondence. We exchanged hundreds of emails a year, year after year, emails in which we wrote not just about our shared work, the editing of Rethinking History, nor our shared vocation, thinking about and writing history, but also about our lives on two sides of the pond, the latest news and information about our families, hometowns, his garden, my parks, the weather, politics and international relations, the sky at sunrise and sunset, and more.Alun and I thought about the past and history identically. We had radically different ways of writing about them. From the moment Robert and my predecessor as U.S. editor, Craig Harlan, introduced us, Alun was nothing but open-minded about and supportive of my way and about the much wider range of prose, poetry, and images that I solicited and accepted for my experimental history writing issues. His rave email 'reviews' of those issues -shortly after publication, sometimes an essay-byessay analysis -are some of the most thoughtful and generous reviews I've received.There will be no more emails from Alun. Happily I have them all saved. All I need to do is search for his name, scroll down the screen, and open one at random to be reminded of his brilliance as a reader and interpreter, his small 'c' catholicity as an editor, his extraordinary generosity (especially with his time), his warmth and kindness as a human being. To be sure, there were people, ideas, and practices that frustrated him and me. Some of them drove us nuts. But I do not recall the slightest bit of tension between us, and I can't find it anywhere in our correspondence. The only real heat I ever detected coming from Alun was aimed at his computer, the journal's electronic editing system, and postmodern technology more generally.