Books About History & Historians
Our National Life: American History at the National Archives
This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War by James McPherson
A Guide to Oral History and the Law by John A. Neuenschwander
Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed. Eric Foner
A. J. P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe -- By C. J. Wrigley
African American Urban History since World War II -- Edited By Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter
The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History -- By Gordon Wood
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History -- By Margaret MacMillan
Recent Themes on Historians and the Public -- Edited by Donald A. Yerxa
The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom -- By Steven Hahn
Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing -- By David S. Brown
Becoming Historians Edited By James Banner and John R. Gillis
Our National Life: American History at the National Archives
[From the Publisher] Published in honor of the National Archives’ 75th anniversary, this highly illustrated volume takes the reader on a journey through American history, offering a close-up examination of some of the billions of documents, photographs, maps, and films in the holdings of the National Archives. All facets of the American story emerge here, from the noble to the ignoble, the monumental to the mundane. The overriding themes of the nation’s history are covered—territorial exploration and expansion, immigration and migration, political life, the rights of women and minorities, and the growth of industry and technology.
Featuring more than 800 illustrations, with succinct captions, and essays by some of America’s leading journalists, political commentators and broadcasters, this work provides readers with a glimpse into the extensive holdings waiting to be discovered at the National Archives. 320 pages, hardcover. 10-1/2” x 11-1/4”.
This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War by James McPherson
[From Publishe's Weekly] Prolific and much-honored historian McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom, etc.) weighs in on the Civil War in this compilation of 16 essays, most of which have appeared in print before—seven of them in The New York Review of Books. Revised and edited for this collection, the essays read like chapters in a smooth narrative that addresses some of the biggest questions of the Civil War: why did it start? why did the South lose? what motivated the men who fought on both sides? how do we evaluate the top leaders—including Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses G. Grant? McPherson goes about answering these and other questions in his usual graceful style, underscored by a thorough grasp of myriad primary and secondary sources on virtually every aspect of the conflict. He forthrightly expresses his opinions while backing them up with well-reasoned arguments, whether challenging the "Lost Cause" argument about why the South lost, or supporting the proposition that it was slavery—and not states' rights—that was the main cause of the war. This strong addition to the massive Civil War canon will appeal to all readers.
A Guide to Oral History and the Law by John A. Neuenschwander
[From the Publisher] A Guide to Oral History and the Law is the definitive resource for all practitioners of oral history. In clear, accessible language it thoroughly explains all the critical legal issues, including legal release agreements; copyright; privacy; screening, editing, and sealing procedures to protect against defamation; the protection of sealed and anonymous interviews from courtroom disclosure; the role of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs); teaching considerations; and the new issues raised by the use of interviews on the Internet. Neuenschwander's central focus is prevention, rather than litigation, and he cites not only the most recent court cases but also examples of procedures and policies that oral history programs have used effectively to avoid legal difficulties. The book provides more than a dozen sample legal release agreements applicable to a variety of situations. This essential volume will be used by professionals, family historians, and students alike.
Living in the Eighties ed. Gil Troy and Vincent Cannato
[From the Publisher] Some see the 1980s as a Golden Age, a "Morning in America" when Ronald Reagan revived America's economy, reoriented American politics, and restored Americans' faith in their country and in themselves. Others see the 1980s as a new "Gilded Age," an era that was selfish, superficial, glitzy, greedy, divisive, and destructive. This multifaceted exploration of the 1980s brings together a variety of voices from different political persuasions, generations, and vantage points. The volume features work by Reagan critics and Reagan fans (including one of President Reagan's closest aides, Ed Meese), by historians who think the 1980s were a disastrous time, those who think it was a glorious time, and those who see both the blessings and the curses of the decade. Their essays examine everything from multiculturalism, Southern conservatism, and Reaganomics, to music culture, religion, crime, AIDS, and the city. A complex, thoughtful account of a watershed in our recent history, this volume will engage anyone interested in this pivotal decade.
Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed. Eric Foner
[From Booklist] As the bicentennial birthday of Abraham Lincoln approaches, there will undoubtedly be an increase in the normal (that is, high) publication rate of new Lincoln titles. This anniversary entry assembles some of America’s most eminent historians, whom editor Foner, author of the standard Reconstruction (1988), assigned to write on topics that have concerned Lincoln scholars in recent years. James McPherson sums up Lincoln as commander in chief (and expands in Tried by War, reviewed in this issue); every other historian tackles a nonmilitary topic. Three authors (including Foner on black colonization) address Lincoln and racial prejudice, and Mark Neely looks at Lincoln and habeas corpus, which are two active arenas of scholarship. In a popular-interest vein are interesting articles by Harold Holzer on famous photos of Lincoln, which Holzer argues were sittings intended to assist sculptors and painters; by Catherine Clinton (biography-in-progress of Mary Lincoln) on Abe’s family life; and by Race and Reunion (2001) author David Blight on the political uses of Lincoln in the present. The 12 essays offer insightful variety to Civil War readers.
The Great Tradition: Constitutional History and National Identity in Britain and the United States, 1870-1960 -- By Anthony Brundage and Richard Cosgrove
[Publisher's Statement posted on Amazon.com] The Great Tradition traces the way in which English constitutional history became a major factor in the development of a national identity that took for granted the superiority of the English as a governing race. In the United States, constitutional history also became an aspect of the United States’s self-definition as a nation governed by law. The book’s importance lies in the way constitutional history interpreted the past to create a favorable self-image for each country. It deals with constitutional history as a justification for empire, a model for the emergent academic history of the 1870s, a surrogate for political argument in the guise of scholarship, and an element that contributed to the Anglo-American rapprochement before World War I. The book also traces the rise and decline of constitutional history as a fashionable sub-discipline within the academy.
A. J. P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe -- By C. J. Wrigley
[From the Publisher]
A scholar gentleman in the old style; a northern non-conforming radical; an academic steeped in Oxford traditions; a late-20th century media personality; one of the most outstanding historians of his age: A.J.P. Taylor was all these things. He wrote about traditional historical subjects in a traditional manner and took narrative history to new heights and was equally at home with a critical academic, as with a vast popular, audience. C.J. Wrigley's new biographical study includes fascinating and hitherto unknown details of Taylor's privileged and cosseted childhood, the effect of his close but combative and stimulating family, the dissenting and nonconformist tradition, and his time as a teacher, broadcaster journalist and historian.
Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? -- By Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
[Amazon.com Review by Michael Joseph Gross]
Denying History is a courageous and accessible study of "a looking-glass world where black is white, up is down, and the normal rules of reason no longer apply." Authors Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman have immersed themselves in the conferences, literature, and Web culture of Holocaust deniers; they have engaged the pseudo-historians in debate; and they have visited the concentration camps in Europe to investigate the truth of what happened there. Denying History presents Shermer and Grobman's findings. The book refutes, in detail, the Holocaust deniers' claims, and it demonstrates conclusively that the Holocaust did happen.It also explores the fundamental historical issue in all debates over the truth of the Holocaust: the question of "how we know that any past event happened." Thus, Denying History is a doubly useful book; it sets the record straight on one of history's most terrible events, and it instructs readers in the scientific, logical, and historiographical principles that can help us make wise judgments about history on our own.
African American Urban History since World War II -- Edited By Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter
[From the Publisher]
Historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to African American urban history of the postwar period, especially compared with earlier decades. Correcting this imbalance, African American Urban History since World War II features an exciting mix of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices whose combined efforts provide the first comprehensive assessment of this important subject.
The first of this volume’s five groundbreaking sections focuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, later sections tackle such topics as the real estate industry’s discriminatory practices, the movement of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, and the influence of black urban activists on national employment and social welfare policies. Another group of contributors examines these themes through the lens of gender, chronicling deindustrialization’s disproportionate impact on women and women’s leading roles in movements for social change. Concluding with a set of essays on black culture and consumption, this volume fully realizes its goal of linking local transformations with the national and global processes that affect urban class and race relations.
The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History -- By Gordon Wood
[From Publishers Weekly] The subtitle of this latest offering from Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution) is far grander than what he delivers between the covers: a collection of 21 book reviews of works by Simon Schama, Theodore Draper and Joyce Appleby, among others, written over the past three decades for periodicals like the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. Though reviews are occasional pieces not designed to be republished years later, some of Wood's pieces make enduring points. He lambastes scholars who clutter their writing with unintelligible jargon, and he worries that today's historical scholarship, too driven by present concerns, fails to retain a sense of how the past really is different. He makes clear that he prefers old-fashioned political history to cultural history that draws on postmodern theory. Indeed, the book is maddeningly repetitive: Wood invokes Peter Novick's This Noble Dream over and over, though not as often as he laments the use of theory in cultural history and the radical Foucault-like agendas that seem to drive certain literary historians. This volume is not without merit, but rather than appending a short afterword to each review, Wood would have done better to craft a new, unified reflection on the discipline of history.
From Gentleman's Club to Professional Body: The Evolution of the History Department in the United States, 1940-1980 -- By William Palmer
Carl Degler: "Any serious reader of European or American history would find this compelling book insightful as well as informative as it explains the broad evolution of seven of the leading American university departments of history. The author, a professor of history himself (not one of the seven) examines critically and thoughtfully yet informally the several changes in historical interpretations in the course of forty years. A number of the historians are quoted directly, though not always friendly to a department's ascent or descent. Of course, for any historian, Palmer's study offers a readable, even amusing and rare overview which can recapitulate his or professional past, as I certainly did."
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History -- By Margaret MacMillan
[From Publishers Weekly] Starred Review. MacMillan, author of the acclaimed Paris 1919, reminds readers that history matters: It is particularly unfortunate that just as history is becoming more important in our public discussions, professional historians have largely been abandoning the field to amateurs. According to MacMillan, this is a grave mistake. Governments and leaders use history to invent tradition and subvert the past. In a world hungry for heroes, badly researched historical biographies fly off bookstore shelves. In this highly readable and polished book, readers learn of the dangers of not properly tending to the past, of distorting it and ignoring inconvenient facts. If done correctly, history helps unlock the past in useful ways. The author explores the ways history has present meaning—not always constructively: in providing a sense of identity for groups, as a basis of nationalism or national pride, as a tool for redress of past wrongs and as an ideological tool. In this important work, we learn that history is more than presenting facts, it is about framing the past. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the importance of correctly understanding the past.
Recent Themes on Historians and the Public -- Edited by Donald A. Yerxa
[From the Publisher:]
This title presents original discussions on the public role of history and historians from a pantheon of notable experts. "Recent Themes on Historians and the Public" represents some of the best recent writing on the public role of historians. These articles and interviews from "Historically Speaking" examine the relationship between historians and their audiences. Award-winning 'popular historian' Adam Hochschild begins by discussing the relationship between popular and academic history. An all-star cast of historians and editors offer their responses, forming a fascinating extended conversation. This forum addresses questions such as what the public role of the historian should be and whether practicing history requires a license. In addition the book contains a candid exchange about the state of the history profession at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Designed to engage both students and general readers, "Recent Themes on Historians and the Public" illuminates the controversy over the role of historians in the public sphere. The contributors are Eric Arnesen, H. W. Brands, John Demos, Joseph J. Ellis, John Ferling, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Thomas Fleming, James Goodman, Adam Hochschild, Bruce Kuklick, John Lukacs, Joyce Lee Malcolm, Louis P. Masur, Wilfred M. McClay, Greg Neale, Maureen Ogle, William Palmer, Leo P. Ribuffo, Joyce Seltzer, Daniel Snowman, Barry Strauss, Marc Trachtenberg, Derek Wilson, John Wilson, and Jay Winik.
The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom -- By Steven Hahn
[From the University of Pennsylvania website]
When Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History, visited the New York Historical Society’s exhibit, Slavery in New York, several years ago, he was surprised by how surprised visitors were to discover New York’s long involvement with slavery. “Most were simply stunned,” he recounts in his new book, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. They never knew how deeply embedded slavery was in the North and that it remained a national—not just Southern—institution right up to the Civil War.
Hahn is a specialist on the history of the American South, the history of the 19th-century United States, the international history of slavery and emancipation, and African American history. His book A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration won several prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.
His new book takes to task the deeply rooted slavery-to-freedom narrative that most of us learned in school. That story admits the centrality of slavery in U.S. history and celebrates emancipation, but it emphasizes the struggle for assimilation, integration and citizenship by generations of freed slaves. “I try to interrogate that narrative and suggest it is more complicated than we make it out to be,” Hahn says, “and that we ought to take the aspirations that don’t fit neatly into this narrative more seriously.”
Hahn explores 150 years of African American history, looking at how slaves and freed blacks practiced politics from the lead-up to emancipation through the rise of Black Power. He looks at “slavery’s wide expanse and prolonged demise” and uncovers previously hidden tales of African American political organization and activism. Hahn notes that 150,000 slaves crossed Union lines during the Civil War and took up arms. (More than half a million fled the plantations.) Southern authorities understood the act as armed insurrection and dealt with it by execution. “What seemed so obvious to slaveholders and Confederate officials at the time, however, has been widely resisted or rejected by historians,” he writes. He asks whether the writers of history have simply missed what is the greatest slave rebellion in modern history.
Hahn also examines the mostly hidden history of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey. UNIA was a black-empowerment movement that aimed to establish a nation of its own in Africa. It had many followers in the 1910s and ‘20s—“probably the largest social movement among people of African descent in the 20th century,” Hahn says—but there is little scholarly study of its “long political and intellectual shadows.” Historians tend to see facts that emphasize “ideals and goals … that black and white Americans embraced together,” he argues—equal rights, integration and other democratic ideals. Narratives that inform us about grassroots political activity that promote black self-determination, self-governance and self-defense have gone largely untold.
The received history that tells the story of African Americans’ journey from slavery to civil rights has a lot of staying power. “I am struck by how difficult it has been to unsettle well-entrenched frameworks of analysis and ways of seeing the past,” Hahn writes. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom is ultimately “about the political worlds of both history making and history writing.”
Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing -- By David S. Brown
[From the Publisher]
As the world went to war in 1941, Time magazine founder Henry Luce coined a term for what was rapidly becoming the establishment view of America’s role in the world: the twentieth century, he argued, was the American Century. Many of the nation’s most eminent historians—nearly all of them from the East Coast—agreed with this vision and its endorsement of the vigorous use of power and persuasion to direct world affairs. But an important concentration of midwestern historians actively dissented. With Beyond the Frontier, David S. Brown tells their little-known story of opposition.
Raised in a cultural landscape that combined agrarian provincialism with reform-minded progressivism, these historians—among them Charles Beard, William Appleman Williams, and Christopher Lasch—argued strenuously against the imperial presidencies, interventionist foreign policies, and Keynesian capitalism that swiftly shaped cold war America. Casting a skeptical eye on the burgeoning military-industrial complex and its domestic counterpart, the welfare state, they warned that both components of the liberal internationalist vision jeopardized the individualistic, republican ethos that had long lain at the heart of American democracy.
Drawing on interviews, personal papers, and correspondence of the imoprtant players in the debate, Brown has written a fascinating follow-up to his critically acclaimed biography of Richard Hofstadter. Illuminating key ideas that link midwestern writers from Frederick Jackson Turner all the way to William Cronon and Thomas Frank, Beyond the Frontier is intellectual history at its best: grounded in real lives and focused on issues that remain salient—and unresolved—even today
Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage by Eugene Genovese
“Gene Genovese’s tribute to his late wife moved me deeply not only because of the touching beauty of his prose but also because he and Betsey are figures who shaped my life. It is impossible for me to read this work without recalling my first meeting with this remarkable couple many decades ago and about how deeply they impressed me even then. Gene’s recollections about Betsey ring true even for someone like me, who was merely her distant admirer. Like her husband, she had many such devotees, all of whom she fully deserved.”—Paul Gottfried, Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author
Becoming Historians Edited By James Banner and John R. Gillis
[From the Publisher:] In this unique collection, the memoirs of eleven historians provide a fascinating portrait of a formative generation of scholars. Born around the time of World War II, these influential historians came of age just before the upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s and helped to transform both their discipline and the broader world of American higher education. The self-inventions they thoughtfully chronicle led, in many cases, to the invention of new fields—including women’s and gender history, social history, and public history—that cleared paths in the academy and made the study of the past more capacious and broadly relevant. In these stories—skillfully compiled and introduced by James Banner and John Gillis—aspiring historians will find inspiration and guidance, experienced scholars will see reflections of their own dilemmas and struggles, and all readers will discover a rare account of how today’s seasoned historians embarked on their intellectual journeys.
Structural Investigation of Historic Buildings: A Case Study Guide to Preservation Technology for Buildings, Bridges, Towers, and Mills by David C. Fischetti
[From the publisher:] Conservation of our existing structures has obvious economic and social value. Moreover, historic structures provide an excellent laboratory for studying aspects of structural engineering, materials science, forensic engineering, and building design. Structural Investigation of Historic Buildings: A Case Study Guide to Preservation Technology for Buildings, Bridges, Towers, and Mills provides a practical guide for consulting structural engineers and others on dealing with issues unique to historic structures.
The Historian's Paradox by Charles Peter Hoffer
[From an essay published on HNN;] History is impossible. Nothing I have written or could write in The Historians' Paradox: A Philosophy of History for Our Times, will change that brute fact. We cannot go back in time. But doing history, studying the past, is not impossible. If we are to traverse the creative bridge from present to past, we must confront this challenge. There is a striking scene near the end of the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Indiana Jones must cross a yawning chasm to reach the cave that houses the holy grail. He must have faith in his quest and that faith requires he take a step into what appears to be empty space. He does, and finds solid ground–a bridge to the other side. What we need to complete our philosophy is a step of faith onto the bridge every historian constructs.
Where does such a faith arise? Not in the jargon of arcane academic methodologies. When Erasmus dedicated his Praise of Folly to his English host, Thomas More, both men knew that the real purpose of the essay was to get its readers to think about the folly that knowing philosophy or rhetoric could save a man, when faith could not. Erasmus: “All Christian religion seems to have a kind of alliance with folly and in no respect to have any accord with wisdom. Of which if you expect proofs, consider first that boys, old men, women, and fools are more delighted with religious and sacred things than others, and to that purpose are ever next the altars; and this they do by mere impulse of nature. And in the next place, you see that those first founders of it were plain, simple persons and most bitter enemies of learning.”
Last Rites by John Lukacs
[From the Publisher:] Twenty years ago, John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs in "Confessions of an Original Sinner", an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy. Now, in "Last Rites", he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history and human knowledge with private memories of his wives and loves, and enhancing the book with footnotes from his idiosyncratic diaries. The resulting volume is fascinating and delightful, a book of history by a passionate, authentic, brilliant, and witty man. Lukacs begins with a concise rendering of a historical understanding of our world (essential reading for any historian), then follows with trenchant observations on his life in the United States, commentary on his native Hungary and the new meanings it took for him after 1989, and deeply personal portraits of his three wives, about whom he has not written before.He includes also a chapter on his formative memories of May and June 1940 and of Winston Churchill, a subject in some of Lukacs' later studies. "Last Rites" is a richly layered summation combined with a set of extraordinary observations - an original book only John Lukacs could have written.
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