Cole, Robert 1939- (C. Robert Cole, Charles Robert Cole)

PERSONAL:

Born August 24, 1939, in Harper, KS; son of Charles Edgar (a farmer) and Olive Gertrude (a teacher) Cole; married August 9, 1963; wife's name Glenda (divorced); married Ilona Jappinen (a professor), September 14, 1990; children: Teresa Cole-Das. Ethnicity: "Anglo-American." Education: University of Ottawa, B.A., 1961; Kansas State University, M.A., 1967; Claremont Graduate School (now University), Ph.D., 1970. Politics: Liberal Democrat. Religion: Episcopalian. Hobbies and other interests: Skiing, singing, cooking.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Logan UT. Office—Department of History, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322-0710; fax: 435-797-3899. E-mail—rcole@hass.usu.edu.

CAREER:

Utah State University, Logan, professor of history, 1970—.

MEMBER:

North American Conference on British Studies, Western Conference on British Studies (past president).

WRITINGS:

(Under name C. Robert Cole; editor, with Michael E. Moody) The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1975.

A Traveller's History of France, Interlink Books (New York, NY), 1988, 3rd edition, 1994.

Britain and the War of Words in Neutral Europe, 1939-45, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1990.

A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1993.

A Traveller's History of Paris, Interlink Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Propaganda in Twentieth-Century War and Politics: An Annotated Bibliography, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 1996.

(Editor) The Encyclopedia of Propaganda, three volumes, M.E. Sharpe (Armonk, NY), 1998.

A Traveller's History of Germany, Interlink Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Propaganda, Censorship, and Irish Neutrality in the Second World War, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert Cole once told CA: "Writing has many venues. Mine is historical, for the most part, including a short story called ‘Water Music,’ a tongue-in-cheek version of the first performance of the G.F. Handel composition on a barge in the Thames, and Brian and the Dragon, a novel about a young university professor who, while working for U.S. intelligence, is kidnapped by enemy agents, escapes, and returns to his university post glad to be home. Otherwise, I have written serious history and popular history such as the travelers' histories. The serious works are the sort of archive-based monographs that professional historians write as part of their jobs. France and Paris, on the other hand, were a labor of love—general histories of one of my two favorite countries and cities, which required the integration of enormous amounts of detail into readable and interpretive summaries. Paris has been particularly well received, I am happy to say.

"Students are usually perplexed over how to write history. It seems so obvious when they read what a historian has written; how it is done is another matter. The answer is that students must find their own way. What they put on paper has to come from their own perceptions of what they have found and what it means—and, of course, they have to find their own styles. There is, as A.J.P. Taylor once put it, ‘no reason why history can't be written so that someone wants to read it.’ That is what I have tried to do in my work. If any single historical writer has been my mentor, at least in terms of style, it has been Taylor.

"I started out to be an artist; at least, I majored in art at university. Looking back at what survives of my early efforts, I do not expect the Guggenheim to come knocking at my door. In any case, I was much better at art history than at painting or drawing. Some of this came from my father, who seemed always to see things in the perspective of the passage of time, and who was also an avid reader. A Kansas farmer, he would sometimes arrive late in the fields because he could not tear himself away from a magazine article he had started over breakfast. I inherited his instincts in this regard, and that, together with a preference for historical novels over anything else and the enjoyment of expressing myself on paper, turned me into a professional historian. I have never regretted it for a moment."