Nagel, Paul C. 1926–

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Nagel, Paul C. 1926–

(Paul Chester Nagel)

PERSONAL:

Born August 14, 1926, in Independence, MO; son of Paul Conrad (a mechanic) and Freda Nagel; married Joan R. Peterson (a librarian and genealogist), March 19, 1948; children: Eric John, Jefferson, Steven Paul. Education: University of Minnesota, B.A., 1948, M.A., 1949, Ph.D., 1952. Politics: Independent. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Minneapolis, MN.

CAREER:

Historian, writer, lecturer, and educator. Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD, assistant professor of history, 1953-54; Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, associate professor of history, 1954-61; University of Kentucky, Lexington, associate professor of history, 1961-65, professor of history, 1964-69, and dean, College of Arts and Sciences, 1965-69; University of Missouri, Columbia, professor of history, 1969-78, vice president of academic affairs, 1970-74; University of Georgia, Athens, professor of history and head of department, 1978-80; Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, director, 1981-85; Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation, Distinguished Lee Scholar, Life Foundation, 1986-90; lecturer and biographer, beginning 1991.

Visiting professor at Amherst College, 1957-58, Vanderbilt University, 1959, and University of Minnesota, 1964; visiting scholar, Duke University, 1991-92, and University of Minnesota, 1992—; research associate, Carleton College, 1992—. Kentucky Arts Commission, 1966-69; vice chair, board of directors, Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, 1973-74.

MEMBER:

Society of American Historians (fellow), Southern Historical Association, Massachusetts Historical Society, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (trustee), Pilgrim Society (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS:

The Society of Midland Authors named Missouri: A Bicentennial History the best history book published in 1977; designated a Cultural Laureate of Virginia.

WRITINGS:

One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776-1861, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1964, 2nd edition, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 1980.

This Sacred Trust: American Nationality, 1798-1898, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1971, reprinted, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1980.

Missouri: A Bicentennial History, Norton (New York, NY), 1977, reprinted as Missouri: A History, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 1988.

Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1983, reprinted, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

(With Robert A. Caro and others) Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, edited by William Zinsser, American Heritage (New York, NY), 1986.

The Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990, reprinted, 2007.

John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

The German Migration to Missouri: My Family's Story, Kansas City Star Books (Kansas City, MO), 2002.

George Caleb Bingham: Missouri's Famed Painter and Forgotten Politician, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 2005.

Also coauthor of George Caleb Bingham, Saint Louis Arts Museum, 1990, and Massachusetts and the New Nation, edited by Conrad Edick Wright, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1992. Contributor to I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life Dramatic Events that Changed America, edited by Byron Hollinshead, Doubleday, 2006.

Contributor to professional journals, including American Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Midwest Review, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and other historical journals.

Contributing editor, American Heritage.

SIDELIGHTS:

Paul C. Nagel worked in academia for twenty years before becoming an American biographer. As a college administrator at the University of Kentucky and later at the University of Missouri, he wrote One Nation Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776-1861 and This Sacred Trust: American Nationality, 1798-1898. His writing focus switched from the history of ideas to biography in 1973. As he explains in Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, "I'd had enough of university administration and had also just finished This Sacred Trust, the book about American nationalism. In a major change of career and philosophy, I decided to spend most of my time thereafter writing about the lives of people." Nagel believes that chronicling the history of ideas was a useful background for his work as a biographer. The author notes in Extraordinary Lives: "After all, the intellectual historian takes an idea and brings it to life, reconstructing its exterior and interior. I tried to do it in my books about the federal Union and about the sense of nationality with which Americans were burdened in the nineteenth century. I even wrote [Missouri: A Bicentennial History] on the meaning of being from Missouri, where I grew up. For me, working with ideas like these establishes an inviting bridge into the mind and then into the life of people who have held those ideas."

In Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family, Nagel chronicles the Adams family from the founding father John Adams to his great grandson Brooks Adams, an intellectual and writer. In his biography of the Adams family, the author recounts how their fortunes waned and ebbed over the years. Several reviewers appreciated Nagel's emphasis on the family's decline. "Other biographers and historians have recorded the ups; Nagel brings us the downs," stated Kenneth Atchity in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Atchity also noted: "The book is disquieting, and excellent—with wonderful photos." A complete biography must expose the darker side of a subject's life, but reports of this kind "should also be told with affection rather than ruthlessness," Nagel declares in Extraordinary Lives, "I always try to be mindful of this." He added, "At home, hanging above my writing desk, are pictures of ten women, each of whom appears in The Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters.… These presences, with their gazes upon me a century or more after their time, are moving reminders that the severest requirement imposed on a biographer is humility. Writing about another person's life is an awesome task, so one must proceed with a gentleness born from knowing that the subject and the author share the frailties of human mortality."

In an "entertaining and scholarly" manner, according to a contributor to Kliatt, Nagel continues to document the Adams' family with The Adams Women. Restraining his own opinions and presenting the "unique" elements of the twenty-plus women he discusses, "Nagel again proves himself a shrewd psychologist and a gifted biographer … allow[ing] his readers to appreciate the complexity of past lives," noted Jan Lewis, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

Nagel further illuminates the Adams family history in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life. John Quincy Adams, the son of President John Adams, maintained a journal from age eleven and was associated with an overabundance of documents and correspondence, which have been preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Benjamin Schwarz stated in the New York Times Book Review: "Too much of Nagel's book reads like a synopsis of irrelevant events and journeys that Quincy Adams describes in his diaries. The reader longs for more interpretation, less chronicling." Nevertheless, Schwarz called John Quincy Adams "the most successful synthesis of the public and private man" and "the best biography of [Quincy] Adams between two covers." "Still," contended Schwarz, "John Quincy Adams has now inspired more biographies than he perhaps warrants, and it's time for historians to give the subject a rest." In contrast, a Kirkus Reviews contributor called John Quincy Adams "a groundbreaking work" and a "finely detailed portrait of a wrongly neglected American statesman who was not a great president, but who was a great hero."

Other reviewers also had praise for Nagel's biography of Quincy Adams. "Within the parameters of this life, Nagel has succeeded brilliantly in rendering a convincing and engaging portrait of this little-understood statesman," commented Eric P. Olsen in World and I. Olsen also stated that the author "has rounded the portrait of a personality who combined ‘forbidding manners’ with an ardent love for his wife and a disarming awareness of his own shortcomings." Journal of Southern History contributor John R. Howe noted that Nagel paints an entirely different portrait of Quincy Adams than many of the other chroniclers of his life, who viewed Quincy Adams's personality as essentially dour. Howe wrote: "In contrast to the ‘cold, aloof figure often pictured by historians,’ Nagel offers a more balanced and far more nuanced figure who could be cheerful and engaging, was widely regarded to be one of his era's most brilliant dinner companions, and, although an often insensitive husband, frequently penned ‘charmingly erotic’ and warmly received poems to his wife Louisa." Writing in the Wilson Quarterly, Kenneth Silverman lauded Nagel's efforts, noting: "One finishes this strong biography regarding [Quincy Adams] in a like spirit of tenderness and awe."

In addition to his three books chronicling the Adams family, Nagel has written other biographical works. The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family "details the relationship between political and economic success in early Virginia and the personal and political importance to the Lees of events in England," stated Journal of Southern History contributor Robert Dean Pope. Nagel's book "updates earlier [biographies] of the Lees in several respects," commented Jane Turner Censer in the American Historical Review, specifying Nagel's use of the period's political background to put the private and public lives "of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lees in context" with a special focus on the role of women in the Lee family. The Lees of Virginia "shows much interest in [family] relationships," observed a Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries contributor, and "little interest" in their military and "public experiences."

"Nagel, the foremost serious practitioner of the family history, struggled with great skill against the difficulties of the genre in Descent from Glory, but he is less successful in The Lees of Virginia," declared Pope, noting the work's absence of "startling revelations or bold interpretations." Reviewers noted the lack of footnotes in The Lees of Virginia, but, as a Choice contributor remarked, Nagle "does provide a sound essay on his sources." Censer called the work a valuable source for readers interested in the history of the Lee family.

In his 2005 book, George Caleb Bingham: Missouri's Famed Painter and Forgotten Politician, Nagel writes of the noted painter who was also a Missouri politician and statesman. Bingham began his political career prior to the Civil War and continued it for many years after the war was over. Although Bingham is remembered today primarily for his paintings, such as Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, and The Verdict of the People, Nagel focuses primarily on Bingham's political life. Bingham became a devout Whig who vehemently opposed the Democrats and, despite his paintings often depicting the common people, became known for political sympathies in tune with the wealthy art patrons that often commissioned works from him. Bingham won a seat in Missouri's state legislature and brought forth a number of resolutions that would come to be called the "Bingham Resolutions," mostly opposing the expansion of slavery. In another contradiction, Bingham owned slaves. Bingham become the Missouri state treasurer during the Civil War and then, ten years after the war ended in 1865, became adjutant general of the state. Despite the book's emphasis on Bingham's political career, Nagel does not disregard his artistic accomplishments and provides "commentary about their contexts and artistic merits," noted a contributor to Reference & Research Book News. Noting that the book is "amply illustrated," Sean R. Busick wrote in a review for the Journal of Southern History that "nonspecialists and undergraduates will find it is a dearly written introduction to the life of one of America's greatest artists."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Nagel, Paul C., and others, Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, edited by William Zinsser, American Heritage (New York, NY), 1986.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 1991, Jane Turner Censer, review of The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family, p. 1283.

Booklist, October 1, 1997, Brad Hooper, review of John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life, p. 305.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, February, 1988, review of The Adams Women: Abigail and Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters, p. 960; January, 1991, review of The Lees of Virginia, p. 844.

Journal of Southern History, May, 1992, Robert Dean Pope, review of The Lees of Virginia, p. 331; May, 2001, John R. Howe, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 444; November, 2006, Sean R. Busick, review of George Caleb Bingham: Missouri's Famed Painter and Forgotten Politician, p. 933.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1990, review of The Lees of Virginia, p. 920; August 15, 1997, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 1286.

Kliatt, September, 1989, review of The Adams Women, p. 32.

Library Journal, October 1, 1997, Boyd Childress, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 94.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 20, 1983, Kenneth Atchity, review of Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family, p. 12.

National Review, November 10, 1997, Richard Samuelson, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 60.

New York Times Book Review, October 25, 1987, Jan Lewis, review of The Adams Women, p. 23; May 28, 1989, review of The Adams Women, p. 22; October 26, 1997, Benjamin Schwarz, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, July 31, 1987, review of The Adams Women, p. 64; July 20, 1990, review of The Lees of Virginia, p. 43; August 18, 1997, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 75.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2005, review of George Caleb Bingham, p. 230.

Village Voice, December 1, 1987, review of The Adams Women, p. 64.

Wilson Library Bulletin, January, 1991, review of The Lees of Virginia, p. 130.

Wilson Quarterly, winter, 1998, Kenneth Silverman, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 96.

World and I, April, 1998, Eric P. Olsen, review of John Quincy Adams, p. 232.