It's one of the most quoted 20th century lines about literature: "Literature is news that stays news." And Ezra Pound was right. That's why we keep repeating his line.

History has a harder time of it. After all, it's stubbornly tied to aged or aging facts.

Not to say it can't be made new, paraphrasing another famous phrase from Pound. Historians with the gift of storytelling manage this feat.

So does Tony Horwitz, a writer with a gift for merging past and present. His new book, "A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World," follows the template he devised for "Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War" (1999) and "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before" (2002). He intertwines history with travels to the places where history happened, including tales of the people he meets along the way. His is an immensely satisfying hybrid of history, journalism and social commentary.

The genesis of his new book is a stop in Plymouth, Mass. He visits the famous rock, and a park ranger tells him the most common question people ask when they see a date etched in the rock: "Why did it say 1620, visitors wondered, rather than 1492. Wasn't that when Columbus arrived?"
Horwitz chuckles at their confusion, but quickly realizes he's being smug. "Expensively educated at a private school - a history major, no less!," he writes, "I'd matriculated to middle age with a third grader's grasp of early America."

And so the research and journey begin. Horwitz goes to Newfoundland first, where Norsemen-like Leif Ericson came ashore. He spends time with villagers in L'Anse aux Meadows, where a confirmed Norse settlement dates back to about 1000. He visits the Micmac, too, one of the tribes they surely encountered - sharing a "sweat" in their lodge.

Next stop: the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Later, he's in Cibola, Ariz., where the Zuni still thrive long after Coronado and other "conquerors" came and went. Horwitz's destinations are plentiful, his observations about them fresh.

He has a knack for finding people who give his story flesh and blood, comedy and dignity - people like Walter Mares, editor of the local paper in tiny Clifton, Ariz., who declares, "Our whole sense of history is twisted. The Pilgrims, they were boat people. Johnny-come-latelies."

So why, Horowitz keeps wondering, do some stories about the past endure, even when facts contradict them? A member of the Old Colony Club in Plymouth offers one memorable explanation: "Myth is more important than history, History is arbitrary, a collection of facts."

- Robert L. Pincus

Visit Copley News Service at www.copleynews.com.