Higher education at Notre Dame, acquaintance with a student of the elder Schlesinger, and thoughts spurred by the Turner thesis are only part of the story, of course. The area Dr. Poinsatte decided to study was Fort Wayne and not Detroit or Chicago or Cincinnati. Here what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “a sort of home-feeling with the past” worked its magic. Born in Fort Wayne in 1925, Charles Poinsatte was stirred by the names he heard as a boy, Little Turtle, Anthony Wayne, and George Rogers Clarke. Some family property was part of the old Richardville estate, and in his youth he explored an old Indian burial ground there. He has never gotten over his fascination with those men, and now he examines them with his academic tools.
Dr. Poinsatte has always been able to reconcile seemingly conflicting movements in American historical writing. Urban history and frontier history, he argues, are in many ways complementary, for frontier historians can explain to urban historians why the entities they study are located where they are and how they got their start. Likewise, local history and history as most often written by academic professionals benefit from cross-fertilization. Local history always needs to be written from a broad perspective which keeps the local historian from claiming unique status for developments which took place in many other localities at the same time. Likewise, in-depth studies of certain localities provide tests for the larger generalizations of academic historians, generalizations that are too often based on unrepresentative samplings of evidence from national elites and large cultural and political centers like New York and Washington.
Still, one suspects it is the excitement of particular locality’s history which accounts for Dr. Poinsatte’s work. It has already taken him to England and France in search of the records and documents which explain the early history of Fort Wayne. He intends to return to Europe next year to explore still another aspect of history suggested by Fort Wayne’s story, the lives of French military officers who fought in the American Revolution. After that, he might consider a history of Fort Wayne in the railroad era, from 1855 (where Dr. Poinsatte’s work on the canal era ended) to the Progressive Era. Whatever the course of Professor Poinsatte’s future studies, Fort Wayne’s citizens will look forward to reading the results. He has already enriched our understanding of ourselves beyond measure.