One of the joys of documentary editing is the opportunity to watch stories unfold in the documents. Thus, it is not surprising to see academic and trade presses publishing works aimed at a popular audience that rely heavily on historical texts. In the past several decades, documentary editors have done a remarkable job in creating standards, although most of their energies have focused on scholarly editions. Those efforts have been less successful in reaching those who prepare popular editions. Home Front Soldier is a good example of a work that effectively uses documents to tell a story, yet has not benefited from the application of modern editorial standards.
Boydston Prize for 199

Stevens, Michael E.

English

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University of Nebraska - LincolnDigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - LincolnDocumentary Editing: Journal of the Associationfor Documentary Editing (1979-2011) Documentary Editing, Association for3-2000War Stories: Review of Home Front Soldier: The Storyof a GI and His Italian American Family During WorldWar II. Richard Aquila, ed.Michael E. StevensWisconsin Historical SocietyFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/doceditPart of the Digital Humanities Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Reading andLanguage Commons, and the Technical and Professional Writing CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Documentary Editing, Association for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska -Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011) by anauthorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln.Stevens, Michael E., "War Stories: Review of Home Front Soldier: The Story of a GI and His Italian American Family During World War II.Richard Aquila, ed." (2000). Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011). 469.http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/docedit/469A REVIEW War Stories MICHAEL E. STEVENS Home Front Soldier: The Story of a GI and His Italian American FamilY During World War II. Richard Aquila, ed. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xi + 280 pp. S65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7914-4075-3; S21.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7914-4076B1. O ne of the joys of documentary editing is the opportunity to watch stories unfold in the documents. Thus, it is not surprising to see academic and trade presses publishing works aimed at a popular audience that rely heavily on historical texts. In the past several decades, documentary editors have done a remarkable job in creating standards, although most of their energies have focused on scholarly editions. Those efforts have been less successful in reaching those who prepare popular editions. Home Front Soldier is a good example of a work that effectively uses documents to tell a story, yet has not benefited from the application of modern editorial standards. Home Front Soldier is, above all, a labor of love. A mixture of social history and family lore, this collection of family letters is interesting, informative, and, at times, moving. Richard Aquila, professor of history and direc-tor of the American Studies Program at Ball State Uni-versity, and host of National Public Radio's Rock & Roll America, has edited and annotated the World War II-era letters of his father, Philip Aquila. The elder Aquila, the son of working-class Italian immigrants in Buffalo, New York, served stateside during the war as a chemical war-fare instructor between 1943 and 1946. Following Philip's death in 1994, his historian-son acquired a collection of five hundred letters that Philip had sent to his sister, Mary, between August 1944 and November 1945. On ftrst learning of the existence of his father's let-ters, Richard Aquila had hoped to find commentary on the war and the great public issues of the time, but the letters turned out to be far more typical of the genre MICHAEL E. STEVENS is Wisconsin State Historian and administrator of the Division of Public History at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. He is co-author of Editing Historical Documents: A Hand-book of Practice and the editor of eleven documentary volumes, in-cluding Letters from the Front, 1898-1945; Women Remember the War, 1941-1945; and Yester~'s Future: The Twentieth Century Begins. 14 DOCUMENTARY EDITING / March 2000 written by young men away from home for the ftrst time. They contained accounts of the mundane events of life in the stateside military and commented extensively on family concerns back at home. As a historian, Aquila rec-ognized that the letters provided a running commentary on the dynamics of family life among Italian Americans of the era. They revealed deep bonds of affection in the Aquila family as well as petty feuds and squabbles, and shed light on the hopes and dreams of young people separated by war. Collectively, they offered insights into the many roles that Phil Aquila had to play-son, brother, husband, father, soldier, and ftrst-generation American. Shifting between his roles as historian and as family com-mentator, Richard Aquila teases out the meaning of the letters in the introduction, the epilogue, and the annota-tion. In the introduction, he tells the story of his acquisi-tion of the letters, his family'S history, and the larger meaning of the texts. Reading the letters serially, one finds oneself enmeshed in the inner workings of this particular working-class family and caring about the outcome of their daily tasks, misunderstandings, and joys. This volume is not a conventional edition, in which the editor main-tains a reserve and distance from the subject, but is a personal tribute of a son to his father. It suggests ways in which documentary materials, selected and presented, can provide readers with the same sense of discovery that historians experience. Aquila adds explanatory notes in the text of the let-ters within brackets that are written in a colloquial, con-versational style. His departure from a conventional form of annotation gives the book an engaging, personal touch. The rationale behind some of his choices for annotation seems obscure. Why add a note that describes a mailing sticker used to send a cross to his mother (p. 100)? Why transcribe the text of a preprinted Mother's Day card (p. 162)? His description of a novena as "a special Catholic Easter service" is off the mark (p. 141). Given Aquila's interest in telling his father's story through his letters as opposed to a traditional narrative, it is a pity that his treatment of the text itself is so prob-lematic. The editor fails by telling the reader little about his editorial practices. He notes that in minor instances names have been changed to avoid "embarrassment," that "extraneous statements have been removed as indicated by ellipses," that repetitive phrases used to open letters have been deleted along with "general comments about the weather or other superfluous statements that add noth-ing to the narrative" (p. 49). This brief statement raises more questions than it answers. What is the difference between an "extraneous statement" and a "superfluous" one? Are both noted with ellipses? How many names have been changed? Might these not have at least been noted by putting the pseudonyms in brackets? Aquila's silence on other textual questions is equally troubling. Did he change spelling, capitalization, and punc-tuation? Did he correct grammar and syntax? Because he uses the ftrst page of a letter of 22 April 1945 as an illus-tration on page 5, one can deduce an editorial policy by comparing it to the text that is printed on page 152. Aquila corrected spelling ("dessert" becomes "desert"); modi-fted punctuation ("its" is transformed to "it's" and a comma is added to a series); changed ampersands to "and"; and standardized capitalization ("ma" becomes "Ma"). Each of these interventions could have been eas-ily justifted, especially in a volume aimed at a popular au-dience, but the absence of a statement of editorial practice leaves the reader wondering about how the text has been handled. One might argue that, in a volume such as Home Front S oidier, concerns over the treatment of the text are pe-dantic. One can still read and enjoy the letters without knowing editorial policy. Yet Aquila himself argues that his edition will "demonstrate the impact that public edu-cation had on immigrant families" and that his father's gen-eration was "schooled enough in grammar and sentence structure" (p.ll). To do this, we need to see what his fa-ther actually wrote. The younger Aquila's editorial inter-ventions and his silence on textual matters obstructs that end and leaves the reader guessing what was written by the father and what was changed by the son. Home Front S oidier shows how documentary materi-als can be used to reach a popular audience and suggests ways for historians to use texts creatively. It is unfortu-nate that university press review committees do not insist that authors exercise more care in the way they present edited documents. It also reminds documentary editors of the importance of educating their historian colleagues and university press editors about the importance of documentary standards. Boydston Prize for 1999 Ronald A. Bosco has been awarded the third J 0 Ann Boydston Essay Prize for "The Expanding Tex-tual Circle of New England Transcendentalism," Text 11 (1998). The essay-review begins with a four-page prologue which contains an overview of the histori-cal and cultural signiftcance of New England Tran-scendentalism from the 1830s to the 1860s and the recent editorial history of the works of Thoreau and Emerson, as well as Margaret Fuller, Convers Francis, William Ellery Channing, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Louisa May Alcott, and other less-known ftgures in the circle of Transcendentalism. The review itself focuses on Jones Very: The Complete Poems, edited by Helen R. Deese (University of Georgia Press, 1993) and The Selected Letters of Mary Moocfy Emerson, edited by Nancy Craig Simmons (University of Georgia Press, 1993). The citation reads: "Professor Bosco's essay-re-view not only takes into account the cultural and his-torical significance of New England Transcendentalism but also places Jones Very and Mary Moody Emerson within that intellectual and lit-erary context in an artfully fashioned narrative that demonstrates their own importance as well as that of scholarly editions of biographical criticism; it is a model of scholarly erudition and critical acumen that successfully addresses both editorial specialists and non-specialist readers and that argues lucidly and con-vincingly that new editions of previously little-known or underappreciated literary ftgures are important in shaping and modifying our knowledge of Ameri-can literature and culture." The Boydston Prize committee members were George 1. Geckle III (chair), Joseph R. McElrath,Jr., and Barbara Oberg. March 2000 / DOCUMENTARY EDITING 15 

War Stories: Review of \u3ci\u3eHome Front Soldier: The Story of a GI and His Italian American Family During World War II\u3c/i\u3e. Richard Aquila, ed.

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War Stories: Review of \u3ci\u3eHome Front Soldier: The Story of a GI and His Italian American Family During World War II\u3c/i\u3e. Richard Aquila, ed.

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