Nathan Raab - The Hunt for History: On the Trail of the Worlds Lost Treasures—from the Letters of Lincoln, Churchill, and Einstein to the Secret Recordings Onboard JFKs Air Force One

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THE HUNT FOR HISTORY

In another life, I want to be Nathan Raab, living with our most celebrated heroes of the past. In The Hunt for History, we get a firsthand look at a time traveler, document detective, and historical harvester as he mines forand often procureslost treasures. Raab describes the intriguing business side of the deals, but hes also a historian with a passion for his subjects and a true appreciation of their context.

Dan Abrams, coauthor of Lincolns Last Trial and Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense

Like a combination short-story collection by Agatha Christie and reminiscence by Robert Caro, this leading autograph dealers memoir boasts a trove of mystery leavened with a good deal of illuminating history. Like John Hancock writing in large, bold letters, I would mark this book: Highly recommended.

Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln at Cooper Union

Chasing down historical documents is always fascinating. Its doubly fascinating when keen-eyed prospectors like Nathan Raab find the rare gleaming diamonds of our common past. This is a book of captivating adventures. Its great fun to read.

Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

An absorbing narration of Raabs adventures as a rare documents dealer. His account underscores the richness of our heritage, adding intriguing footnotes to the history we thought we knew.

Susan Eisenhower, president of the Eisenhower Group and author of Breaking Free and Mrs. Ike

The Hunt for History fascinates with its stories of tracking down rare artifacts from Americas past. Over the years, Raabs discoveries of personal belongings and documents associated with Lincoln, Edison, JFK, and Churchill have made international news. His track record as an antiquarian, restorer, curator, and field researcher is extraordinary. This book is highly recommended!

Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and author of American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

For those who collector just care aboutthe artifacts of history, Nathan Raab offers a compelling account of his wide-ranging adventures: absorbing journeys into the past that teach valuable lessons. A terrific feat of storytelling, The Hunt for History will forever change the way you think about the events that have shaped our current reality.

Daniel Weiss, president and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Copyright 2020 by Nathan Raab

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First Scribner hardcover edition March 2020

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by Richard Ljoenes

Photo of Edison taken by the Pach brothers in 1904

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019024822

ISBN 978-1-5011-9890-8

ISBN 978-1-5011-9892-2 (ebook)

INSERT PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS: : Martin Luther King Jr., Associated Press

For Karen and Elizabeth

Preface

I n 1849, my great-great-grandfather Charles Vaughn Houston boarded a ship in Boston, an ambitious young man bound for the California gold rush. He rounded the Horn at Tierra del Fuego and landed in San Francisco. He traveled to the gold fields and worked them until 1855, when he took the gold hed found by ship to Panama, and from there began a hazardous, yellow-fever-periled land trip across the isthmus. A vessel brought him back to Maine, where he married his sweetheart, Sophronia Ann Potter. It took him years to accumulate that gold, a product of his own growing expertise, his efforts, and a lot of luck.

Ive often thought of how many times he must have struck ground in failure, searching a rugged landscape, panning in riverbeds, looking for treasure, seeing a speck and wondering what lay below it, what more was hidden. His white whale would have been to tap into some dazzling vein of gold that wound deep into the earth. I dont know if he ever found such a thing, but I do know he came back from the gold fields well-to-do. One artifact is left in the family from this period: a gold nugget that Houston found in California. Maybe it was his first find.

Im on a different kind of hunt. Im searching for history, for relics of the past, for historical documents and artifacts, for the significant, even the pricelesspriceless in the sense of importance, not merely value. Then I do my best to acquire these items for our firm, the Raab Collection, and offer them for sale to the public.

A newly found box in a Maine attic with twenty letters written by Alexander Hamilton; a handwritten address given by George Washington; the pilots landing certificate form filled out and signed by Amelia Earhart when she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic; an American flag carried to the moon and back by Neil Armstrong; an unpublished letter written by Albert Einstein discussing the theory of relativity.

Each day, people from all over the world contact us looking to understand what they have, what it might be worth, and how to sell it. Every day, I sift through dozens of historical documents and artifacts, looking for a few gems. Some are valuable, but many arent. Some are authentic, some arent. In the former cases, I am the bearer of good tidings; in the latter cases, I am the wrecker of dreams. No, unfortunately, that Abraham Lincoln letter you bought online is not real. No, the book personally inscribed by Mahatma Gandhi in the early 1970s is also not real. He died in 1948.

Im searching for those elusive remnants of past lives, forever looking to some undiscovered horizon. In that sense, Im a seeker of people, of the great characters that shaped history. The moment of discovery, when it comes, is sublime and causes everything else to fade into insignificance. The English Romantic poet John Keats captured the feeling in the sonnet On First Looking into Chapmans Homer: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken; / Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stard at the Pacificand all his men / Lookd at each other with a wild surmise / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I have come to know that feeling. That moment when all of history comes rushing forward into the present.

Each day brings new hope, a renewed thrill of discovery; its the reason were in this business in the first place. It never gets old. The contours of discovery are always changing, and each day the texture of discoverythe rarity and significance of the artifacts, the size and origin of the collectionvaries. An original survey of land in Concord, Massachusetts, drawn up by Henry David Thoreau; a letter from Gandhi saying he believes in Jesus; a George Washington letter from the winter encampment of Valley Forge; a letter from Churchill from his underground war rooms thanking the Americans for helping the British in their fight against Hitler. My great-great-grandfather had to sift and sift and sift before finding a single nugget of gold, and we do the same, in the hopes of finding historical treasures.