Editor’s Note: With the exception of replacing the word ‘is’ for ‘was’ (and a few other words of that phrase changed from present tense to past tense), the following text was sent to me by Thomas Goodrich himself when a few years ago I asked him what he wanted me to put in the Metapedia article about him:
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Born and raised in the American Mid-west, Goodrich was a professional writer who lived in Florida. In addition to numerous books devoted to the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, Goodrich has written several other highly popular works, including Scalp Dance—Indian Warfare on the High Plains, 1865-1879, Summer, 1945—Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate, and the ground-breaking book on World War Two, Hellstorm—The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947.
Goodrich’s professional philosophy is simple:
My entire adult life has been devoted to the writing of unwritten history. As we all know, unless you learn from your history, you are doomed to repeat your history.
Thus, I have made it my life’s mission to give voice to history’s losers so that we might actually learn from our history, learn from both sides of our history, in the hope that we might thereby avoid repeating much of that history in the future.
From the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln to World War Two I have chosen the loser’s perspective in my books simply to find out what is mostly unknown and hence, find out what is almost entirely unwritten. Winners do indeed write history and the libraries are full of the winner’s accounts.
I write that one book, that one book which will hopefully help us to not only understand and learn from the “other side,” but will hopefully help us to understand and learn what real history is. Only by understanding both sides of history can we hope to avoid repeating that very history we would prefer to avoid.
As soon as I can afford it, I’ll order a copy of his book Scalp Dance.
Tom was what I’ve called a ‘three-eyed raven’ on this site, in the sense that he saw the historical past as only the greenseers in Martin’s fiction could. And that was because, like Bran the Broken, Tom was abused as a child.
Only those who are knocked off the tower by their parents or guardians and become disabled, but are survivors, are able to cross the Wall in search of the raven. And Tom was one of the very few greenseers in all of Westeros (in the TV series, only Bloodraven held the title of three-eyed crow, and when the old man died that title was inherited by Bran).