A Prolific Professor Has an Equestrian Offering

A Prolific Professor Has an Equestrian Offering

By Louisa Woodville

When Charles C. (Chuck) Caramello started researching his recently published “Riding to Arms: A History of Horsemanship and Mounted Warfare,” he was fulfilling an unrealized ambition—writing books that appealed to horse people.

“I had written books and articles about literature, mainly American literature from 1850 to late-twentieth century,” he said about his 42-year teaching career at the University of Maryland. “Then I started to move toward retirement and was thinking about a second act. The second act turned out to be combining avocation and vocation (his love of riding with academia) and instead of writing about the history of literature, I started writing about the history of horsemanship.”

Caramello’s original idea was to tackle the history of dressage, but this quest morphed into something bigger: a book about horsemanship, or, more accurately, a book about the history of horsemanship, starting with the ancient Greek Xenophon.

“I knew that military history was going to be a part of it,” Professor Caramello said. After the National Sporting Library & Museum in Middleburg awarded him the John H. Daniels Fellowship five years ago, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

Initially the book he started was geared to a general audience, though over time that changed.

“As I got more and more involved in writing it, the natural inclination of a scholar crept in,” he said. “And it became much more of a scholarly book. So my strategy was to keep the actual body of the text, the story that the book tells, as concise as I could so that horse people would enjoy reading it, while moving a lot of material into end notes so that scholars could then follow up with anything else that they wanted. All the details.”

Now that his book has hit the shelves, the accolades are piling up. The late Olympic medalist and author James C. Wofford described it as “an authoritative survey of horse cavalry that identifies salient points in history from the Renaissance to World War I [with] a clear writing and a refreshing lack of academic jargon.”

Professor Mike Huggins, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and author of “Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century” wrote how it covers “the relationship between the horseman and the horse, and their important roles in European and American military life, cavalry warfare, and equitation.”

Why a book on the history of horsemanship? Because, Caramello said, he’s loved riding since his 33-year-old daughter introduced him to that world 25 years ago.

“I was driving Dagmar to the barn all the time, and riding looked really interesting and like it might be fun, so I gave it a try and stepped out on that slippery slope,” he said.

Riding provided respite from the stress of his professional responsibilities.

“I was chair of a very large [English] department, and riding was a completely different kind of activity in a completely different kind of environment,” he said.

These days, Caramello enjoys riding his mare, Lonesome Irish, who is boarded in Sandy Spring, Maryland and is one of many he’s owned in the past decade. “I like mares,” he said. “I’ve had three!”

Just as Caramello’s interest in riding has not abated, nor has his interest in publishing. Presently he’s deep into researching and writing book number two, covering the years 1900-1950.

“My symbolic dates are 1912 to 1948,” he said, explaining that 1912 was the year Olympic Games started (including equestrian events), and that 1948 was when civilians were allowed to compete.

As with his first book, The National Sporting Library & Museum’s book collection is pivotal to Caramello’s research.

“You can be in the reading room and reading a modern edition of a classical work on horsemanship or foxhunting and then go to the rare book room and look at the first early editions of these same classical texts,” he said. “It’s really wonderful. It puts you right into contact with the original sources.”

The library’s mission matches his own—to alert both the general reading population as well as specialized scholars in the field to the history of horsemanship.

“Chuck is a longtime friend of the Library and advocate for our collection, said Reid O’Connor, NSLM’s Director of Development, noting that in the five years he’s been a John H. Daniels Fellow, Caramello has published and lectured extensively.

“Chuck’s interest in the history of riding extends beyond that of scholar and into his own experience as a horseman,” she added.

In researching the new book, Caramello said that as civilian interest in horsemanship grew, that of military men lessened.

“A lot of those books that I [referred to] in “Riding to Arms” were for military people, [but now] military riders start to disappear, and civilians are increasingly riding [and writing],” he said, adding, “Basically this new book is about is what happened in that period when horse cavalry became an anachronism and horses were no longer fundamentally used for transportation any longer.”

Another difference between this book and his last? Women.

“There are all these really interesting women writing books about horsemanship,” said Caramello, using Lida Fleitman Bloodgood, whose papers the NSLM holds, and Margaret Cabell Self as just two of more than 50 female authors who penned horse books during this period. Why so many? “It’s tied up with the emancipation of women, women suffrage, feminism, the rise of the middle class, increased leisure activity, and increased literacy,” he said.

Fans eagerly anticipate “Tiding Between the Wars,” and after it’s published, Caramello said he’ll be working on a third book. Stay tuned.