Jeff,
I'd hardly consider myself a historian either...just a person with a keen interest in a very specialized field of history, that being golf course architectural evolution and attribution.
In the early 70s my interest was stimulated by Herbert Warren Wind's writings, including a piece titled "The Architect Makes the Course Great", which appeared in a coffee table tome my father brought home to me from work.
In the early 90s, I received "The Architects of Golf" as a Christmas present, and the breadth of information contained within really stimulated my interest. I'd always loved to play different golf courses, had played about 500 or so by that time, and I set out to discover the attribution information of courses I'd played that weren't included in the book through letters, newspaper research, and then finally, the Internet.
That expanded to all public courses in the mid-atlantic, northeast region, and so on, and then to private courses as well, always as an "amateur", and simply as an enjoyable hobby that gave me a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction.
My intent had been to share all of my research with Cornish and Whitten for what I hoped would be an expanded, updated copy of their book. I sent a lot of information to Mr. Cornish, who couldn't have been more of a gentleman, but it's unlikely that book will ever be written, unfortunately.
Still, with the Internet available to researchers these days, I'm not sure what's needed is another book, but perhaps more of a clearing house of information online.
Relatedly, since I was a 13 year old kid sitting in a ramshackle clubhouse flipping through the 1971 Sports Illustrated US Open preview reading a story titled, "The Ghosts of Merion", Merion has always been my favorite course. Years later, when I was fortunate to see it during the 1989 US Amateur, and then later play there a few times, it never disappointed, and the lore of the place and indeed, the ghosts who inhabit it are palpable.
Similarly, since the first time I played there in 1981, Cobb's Creek also had a very special, and very spiritual feel to me. Although local legend had it that Hugh Wilson designed the course, there was nothing solid that I'd ever seen to prove that, and indeed, local lore also stated that the course changed considerably over time, although no one seemed to be able to say exactly how.
Over the years, I became more and more troubled by this mystery, and once some folks here started using the Dallin Collection of the Hagley Museum for aerial research, I decided to send an email to the museum asking if they had anything on Cobbs.
About six weeks passed, without a response. Then, one day out of the blue six aerial photos arrived in my email, and it became clear to me that the course could be restored. I immediately started a thread on GolfClubAtlas.
Enter Joe Bausch, who is the Indiana Joe(nes) of golf course research. Soon, he was able to pull just this amazing architectural and social and athletic history from the backshelves of dusty history and between us, and with some additional contributions by Geoff Walsh and others we put together a 300 page book that chronicles the almost 100 year history that proves that not only was Hugh Wilson responsible for the course, but so was George Crump, Ab Smith, William Flynn, and even Walter Travis late in the game, along with other local course building "experts" like George Klauder and J. Franklin Meehan. What's more, the building of the course was due to the goading of city officials in the press by writers like A.W. Tillinghast and William Evans.
If ever there was a story to prove the collaboration efforts of "The Philadelphia School" of architecture, and how these guys worked together, this certainly would be one.
Over time, our efforts were directed not only at chronicling this history, but actively trying to recapture it with collaborative efforts of our own to attempt to restore the golf course to its former glory.
Stay tuned...