David Hackett Fischer honored by American Enterprise Institute

Historian David Hackett Fischer, who has played a pivotal role in reviving popular and academic interest in American history and its lessons for the present, has been selected to receive the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award for 2006. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at the Institute’s annual dinner on March 8, 2006, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Professor Fischer is a pioneer among historians who are combining modern methods of research and interpretation with renewed appreciation for the importance of contingency, choice, and character in the unfolding of the American drama. His bestselling books Washington’s Crossing (Oxford, 2004), which received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in History, and Paul Revere’s Ride (Oxford, 1994) are more than meticulous retellings of great revolutionary events: they provide readers with a vivid sense of how the events were experienced in the immediate moment and of how they affected choices and decisions yet to come.

Although he describes himself as “primarily a storyteller and old-fashioned history teacher,” Professor Fischer’s historical narratives are also notable for their deep illumination of social and cultural circumstance.

The Irving Kristol Award, AEI’s highest award, recognizes individuals who have made extraordinary intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy or social welfare. The award was established in 2002 in honor of AEI senior fellow Irving Kristol, replacing the Institute’s Francis Boyer Award, which had been awarded annually for the previous twenty-five years. The Irving Kristol Award is selected by AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers.