Professional Biography

Eric Chaney

It is the historian’s job, I think, to rescue stories before they are forever forgotten, and we
are often tasked with the weighty burden of choosing what is to be saved. We trend toward
documenting the great and the terrible, the outliers of good and bad that stir something in us –
love, pride, fear, horror, revulsion, admiration, astonishment.
When my father’s mother passed away in 2004, we mourned her with stories. My family
is full of natural storytellers, and the two decades that I had known my grandmother were
stripped away within an hour. Soon I was listening to my aunts and uncles tell tales that I had
never heard before. These weren’t secrets, exactly, just things that no one had ever told me and,
more importantly, things that I had never bothered to find out.
I became slightly obsessed with the idea of finding out what “really” happened, not just
in my own family but also in the history I learned in school and saw on TV. I devoured books
that leaned heavily on primary sources – Down the Great Unknown and Endurance: Shackleton's
Incredible Voyage are favorites I’ve read again and again. I learned Ancestry and Family Search,
wrote to county courthouses for vital records, and scoured libraries and archives for primary
sources.
It was exhilarating.
It felt like detective work, spending weeks searching for an elusive clue that might open
the floodgates or immediately end in another brick wall. It felt like salvage work, unearthing
something that hadn’t been seen for decades or even centuries, pulling it out of the historical
muck, and washing it off to show it to the world. It felt like finding buried treasure. I wish
someone had told me then that I could do this for a living.
But in my quest to become a storyteller myself, I followed a cousin to journalism school
at the University of Missouri. My career progressed from newspaper reporter to magazine editor
to writing for The Weather Channel to editing historical coffee table books to doing genealogical
research for the US Army. With every job change I found more and more that what drove me,
what made me excited to go to work, was the rediscovery of forgotten history. Covering
hurricanes and snowstorms for weather.com was suddenly less appealing than my side job –
genealogy research for the Army Casualty Office’s mission to help identify the remains of World
War II soldiers and bring them home.
What I came to realize, digging through vital records, obituaries, newspaper clippings,
and family photos, is that history interests me, particularly “history from below”, that is, the
everyday experiences and perspectives of “common” people.
It saddens me to think of the millions of ordinary people who lived and died, small
businesses that were built and lost, relationships made and broken, all of which have simply
disappeared into the black hole of the past, swallowed up as if they never were. This is especially
important for groups (and topics) that historically have been underrepresented in our examination
of the past. I once heard a history teacher say, “Everyone should be able to see themselves in my
class,” and I wholeheartedly agree.
While we must accept that much has been, and will continue to be, irretrievably lost, I know
there are forgotten stories buried in archives across the country waiting to be rediscovered,
stories worth telling and worth hearing.
 One such story that I am currently pursuing comes from my own family – a story of two
brothers, mistaken identity, and a train robbery. An intriguing hook, to be sure, but there is a
deeper story to be told that explores family dynamics, the post-Civil War West, and the
relationship between mental health and the American prison system at the turn of the 20th
century.
I believe that I am well positioned to tell these types of stories. The passion I found in
rediscovering forgotten history opens a new avenue for the research and writing skills I have
developed over my decades-long career in journalism, which have honed my ability to identify
interesting story threads, distill them from larger themes, and present them to the public in a way
that is both approachable and engaging.
Another, more ambitious idea I am exploring is perhaps more suited to an archivist than a
historian. But I would like to see a national index of letters from the Civil War era. The
documents themselves would still reside at their respective institutions, but a centralized online
database searchable by name, date, location, and perhaps even subject matter, would enable
historians to more easily follow thematic threads over the course of the war. In particular, I hope
this would bring to light more of the “common” perspective on the war, more lived experiences
from people whose names are not Lee or Grant or Lincoln.
It is this notion that is my lodestar as historian, to fight the outdated trope that “winners”
and “big men” should write history. We should strive to examine as many threads as we can in
the chaotic tapestry that is our past, both good and bad. After all, we are all the principal actors in
our own story, and we are all history.