Books About History & Historians
This page features new books about history and historians: memoirs by historians, books about historians, books about historiography. Click here to let us know about books that should appear on this page.
[From Brown University]
Thoughtful, funny, pointed and honest, A Liberal Education is an insightful scholar's memoir of the generation that came of age in the late fifties—an opaque generation hinged between the conformist fifties and the rebellious late sixties.
Born into a family of historians, Abbott Gleason earned his liberal education on the streets of Cambridge, at a family farm in northeastern Connecticut, in the jazz clubs of Washington as a schoolboy in the fifties. He learned about a larger world from his Harvard roommates and from the students at Tougaloo College in the summer of 1964. He employed his education in the professional study of Russia and the Soviet Union as a professor of history at Brown University and a stint in Washington, D.C., as Director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. But his most important teachers were his own family members.
Combining first-hand insights into the evolution of Russian studies in America and poignant reflections on his contested relationship with his Cold Warrior father, Gleason has struck a refreshing balance between scholarly assessment and a highly personal story—always with candor, fairness and good humor. A Liberal Education should convince the skeptics that accomplished academics can lead rich and questioning lives. Abbott Gleason's memoir offers brilliant and consistently engaging evidence that professors are—or can be—very human both inside academia and on the streets outside.
[From the publisher]
Italian gardens have received more attention from historians than perhaps any other garden tradition. This volume presents eight richly illustrated essays by established and emerging scholars that suggest striking new directions for future research.
Mirka Beneš and Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto examine the long historical development and disciplinary diversity of Italian garden studies. Marcello Fagiolo and Vincenzo Cazzato advance a new theory of villa systems that enlarges the geographical frame of the field. Mauro Ambrosoli highlights the contributions of anonymous laborers and gardeners in the creation of the countryside, while Lionella Scazzosi shows how this broader view of agency informs decisions by policymakers regarding the restoration and maintenance of historical gardens. Antonella Pietrogrande and Denis Ribouillault offer new interpretations of some of the most famous Renaissance sites through analyses of cultural imagination and modes of perception.
This volume exemplifies the broad transformations, both quantitative and methodological, taking place in the study and practice of garden design, and offers a reflective meditation on the vitality of one of the oldest branches of garden and landscape history.
[From Amazon]
The story of an activist's struggle for social change in the United States
Son of famous sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd, Staughton Lynd was one of the most visible figures of the New Left, a social movement during the 1960s that emphasized participatory democracy. His tireless campaign for social justice prompted his former Spelman College student, Alice Walker, to remember him as"her courageous white teacher" who represented"activism at its most contagious because it was always linked to celebration and joy."
In this first full-length study of Lynd's activist career, author Carl Mirra charts the development of the New Left and traces Lynd's journey into the southern civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements during the 1960s. He details Lynd's service as a coordinator of the Mississippi Freedom Schools, his famous and controversial peace mission to Hanoi with Tom Hayden, his turbulent academic career, and the legendary attempt by the Radical Historians' Caucus within the American Historical Association to elect him AHA president. The book concludes with Lynd's move in the 1970s to Niles, Ohio, where he assisted in the struggle to keep the steel mills open and where he works as a labor lawyer today.
The Admirable Radical is an important contribution to the study of social history and will interest both social and intellectual historians.
[From Amazon.com]
Communications and Humanity advances a new theory of media that explains the origins and impact of different forms of communication - speech, writing, print, electronic devices, and the Internet - on human history in the long term. New media are"pulled" into widespread use by broad historical trends and these media, once in widespread use,"push" social institutions and beliefs in predictable directions. This view allows us to see for the first time what is truly new about the Internet, what is not, and where it is taking us.
[From Amazon.com]
From History to Theory describes major changes in the conceptual language of the humanities, particularly in the discourse of history. In seven beautifully written, closely related essays, Kerwin Lee Klein traces the development of academic vocabularies through the dynamically shifting cultural, political, and linguistic landscapes of the twentieth century. He considers the rise and fall of"philosophy of history" and discusses past attempts to imbue historical discourse with scientific precision. He explores the development of the"meta-narrative" and the post-Marxist view of history and shows how the present resurgence of old words--such as"memory"--in new contexts is providing a way to address marginalized peoples. In analyzing linguistic changes in the North American academy, From History to Theory innovatively ties semantic shifts in academic discourse to key trends in American society, culture, and politics.
[From Amazon.com]
With the same passionate immediacy as Eire brought to his memoir of a Cuban boyhood, the National Book Award–winning Waiting for Snow in Havana (2002), he writes now about coming to America at age 11. The story takes readers from the journey to American itself—Eire was one of 14,000 unaccompanied refugee children in 1962’s Operation Pedro Pan—through his time in foster homes, both kind and harsh, and eventually to joining his uncle in Chicago, “where everyone came from somewhere else.” Desperate to be American, the teen wants to kill the Cuban in himself, and the personal details are funny, furious, and heartbreaking, as he keeps changing his name (to Charles, Chuck, Charlie, back to Carlos). Now a professor at Yale, he still believes “bilingualism is crap.” He remembers prejudice and ignorance not only from classmates and textbooks but also in himself. He challenges sentimental slogans: absence does not make the heart grow fonder, as his reunion with his mother shows. An essential addition to the Booklist Core Collection feature “The New Immigration Story” (2005), this is about finding home in America by letting go.
[From Amazon.com]
The 1970s were a complex, multilayered, and critical part of an era of profound societal change and an essential component of the decade before-several of the most iconic events of"the sixties" occurred in the ten years that followed. The Hidden 1970s explores the distinctiveness of those years, when radicals tried to change the world as the world changed around them. Essays trace the struggles from the 1960s through the 1970s, providing insight into the ways that radical social movements shaped American political culture in the 1970s and the many ways they continue to do so today.
[From Amazon.com]
Sometime around 1750, English entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal, and the world was forever changed. The emergence of factories, railroads, and gunboats propelled the West’s rise to power in the nineteenth century, and the development of computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many worry that the emerging economic power of China and India spells the end of the West as a superpower. In order to understand this possibility, we need to look back in time. Why has the West dominated the globe for the past two hundred years, and will its power last?
Describing the patterns of human history, the archaeologist and historian Ian Morris offers surprising new answers to both questions. It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate. As geography and human ingenuity continue to interact, the world will change in astonishing ways, transforming Western rule in the process.
Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why the West Rules—for Now spans fifty thousand years of history and offers fresh insights on nearly every page. The book brings together the latest findings across disciplines—from ancient history to neuroscience—not only to explain why the West came to rule the world but also to predict what the future will bring in the next hundred years.
[From Booklist]
The qualities that define great leadership are almost as mercurial and indecipherable as those that identify great art: one notices more their absence than their presence, and sometimes a rearview mirror is necessary to determine if they ever existed at all. Isaacson has gathered preeminent writers to examine this slippery conundrum, each author portraying significant, and surprising, figures from America’s history. From historian Thomas Fleming’s penetrating review of George Washington’s military prowess to professor Glenda Gilmore’s robust depiction of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, the studies offer illuminating, insightful, and inspiring examples of valor and integrity. Likewise, biographer Robert Dallek’s judicious examination of the failures that beset successive presidents, from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, puts forth a cautionary and controversial notion of establishing a mechanism whereby officials can be recalled when they prove themselves incapable of demonstrating these requisite qualities. Incisive, shrewd, and perhaps even prescient, this eclectic collection offers rich food for thought for students of history and management alike.
[From Amazon.com]
The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience.
The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship.
The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.
[From Publishers Weekly]
Late in 1952, John Lukacs, a young, then-unknown American historian who would become a respected professor and self-proclaimed reactionary, sent George Kennan, then U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, his own writings on Kennan's widely-debated argument of containment over confrontation when it came to the USSR. Lukacs asked for the ambassador's opinion, Kennan responded, and the two became lifelong pen pals. Lukacs, with permission from Kennan's children, has compiled over 200 of their letters, capturing two important voices on U.S. involvement in world affairs, from the division of Europe after World War II to its unification as the Soviet Union collapsed, and from Vietnam and the threat of nuclear annihilation to NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe. Both men favored eloquent, often abstruse language, making for heavy reading, and some letters, such as a correspondence in which they critique each other's writings, lack context (the original letters were left out), though Lukacs provides commentary throughout. Divided into five chronological sections, the book concludes with a letter from Lukacs to Kennan dated January 25, 2004, only weeks before Kennan's 100th birthday and 14 months before his death.
[From Amazon.com]
The pathbreaking work of renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis has added profoundly to our understanding of early modern society and culture. She rescues men and women from oblivion using her unique combination of rich imagination, keen intelligence, and archival sleuthing to uncover the past. Davis brings to life a dazzling cast of extraordinary people, revealing their thoughts, emotions, and choices in the world in which they lived. Thanks to Davis we can meet the impostor Arnaud du Tilh in her classic, The Return of Martin Guerre, follow three remarkable lives in Women on the Margins, and journey alongside a traveler and scholar in Trickster Travels as he moves between the Muslim and Christian worlds. In these conversations with Denis Crouzet, professor of history at the Sorbonne and well-known specialist on the French Wars of Religion, Davis examines the practices of history and controversies in historical method. Their discussion reveals how Davis has always pursued the thrill and joy of discovery through historical research. Her quest is influenced by growing up Jewish in the Midwest as a descendant of emigrants from Eastern Europe. She recounts how her own life as a citizen, a woman, and a scholar compels her to ceaselessly examine and transcend received opinions and certitudes. Natalie Zemon Davis reminds the reader of the broad possibilities to be found by studying the lives of those who came before us, and teaches us how to give voice to what was once silent.
[From Amazon.com]
Awaken: the Memoirs of a Chinese Historian transports readers into the turmoil and transformation of China in the 20th century through the eyes of a rare survivor, the Chinese Christian and scholar, Gu Chang-sheng. His memoir is the riveting and inspirational journey of a man who retained his independent spirit against crushing odds. Missionaries rescued the Gu family from poverty and starvation and Chang-sheng grew up as a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. At the mission school, Chang-sheng endured hunger, back-breaking work, and humiliation in order to get the precious education he needed for medical school. The Communist Revolution dashed his dreams. The government of the People's Republic dictated that Chang-sheng's new career would be that of historian of Christianity in China. Under Mao Ze-dong, Chang-sheng survived beatings,"re-education" sessions, imprisonment and hard labor. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, he chose freedom in the United States in order to speak out for human rights. Many books have been written about life in China under Communism. Awaken: the Memoirs of a Chinese Historian spans almost the entire 20th century, giving Western audiences a unique perspective on eight decades of religious and secular life in China before the birth of the People's Republic as well as during the Communist regime. Gu Chang-sheng's memoir parallels his youth under the authoritarianism of Christian missionaries with adulthood under the Chinese Communists. He renounced the dogma of the Seventh Day Adventist Church but never joined the Communist Party. His independence meant imprisonment and forced labor at worst; it was a balancing act at best. No matter what his circumstances, Gu Chang-sheng lived true to his motto,"Seek truth from facts" and continues to do so today.
[From the publisher]
Hugh Trevor-Roper's life is a rich subject for a biography - with elements of Greek tragedy, comedy and moments of high farce. Clever, witty and sophisticated, Trevor-Roper was the most brilliant historian of his generation. Until his downfall, he seemed to have everything: wealth and connections, a chair at Oxford, a beautiful country house, an aristocratic wife, and, eventually, a title of his own. Eloquent and versatile, fearless and formidable, he moved easily between Oxford and London, between the dreaming spires of scholarship and the jostling corridors of power. He developed a lucid prose style which he used to deadly effect. He was notorious for his acerbic attacks on other historians, but ultimately tainted his own reputation with a catastrophic error when he authenticated the forged 'Hitler Diaries'.
Adam Sisman sheds new light on this fascinating and dramatic episode, but also shows that there was much more to Hugh Trevor-Roper's career than the fiasco of the Hitler Diaries hoax that became his epitaph. From wartime code-breaking to grilling Nazis while the trail was still fresh in 1945 (and finding Hitler's will buried inside a bottle), to his wide-ranging interests, his snobbery and his malice, his formidable post-war feuds with Evelyn Waugh, Tawney, Toynbee, Taylor and many others, and his secret and passionate affair with an older, married woman. A study in both success and failure, Adam Sisman's biography is a revealing and personal story of a remarkable life.
The first biography of the great historian whose career was made and unmade by Hitler.
[From Amazon.com]
Once a forest has been destroyed, should one plant a new forest to emulate the old, or else plant designer forests to satisfy our immediate needs? Should we aim to re-create forests, or simply create them? How does the past shed light on our environmental efforts, and how does the present influence our environmental goals? Can we predict the future of restoration?
This book explores how a consideration of time and history can improve the practice of restoration. There is a past of restoration, as well as past assumptions about restoration, and such assumptions have political and social implications. Governments around the world are willing to spend billions on restoration projects – in the Everglades, along the Rhine River, in the South China Sea – without acknowledging that former generations have already wrestled with repairing damaged ecosystems, that there have been many kinds of former ecosystems, and that there are many former ways of understanding such systems. This book aims to put the dimension of time back into our understanding of environmental efforts. Historic ecosystems can serve as models for our restorative efforts, if we can just describe such ecosystems. What conditions should be brought back, and do such conditions represent new natures or better pasts? A collective answer is given in these pages – and it is not a unified answer.
[From Amazon.com]
This groundbreaking volume establishes new perspectives on black history - its scholarship and pedagogy, scholars and interpreters, and evolution as a profession. Pero Gaglo Dagbovie discusses a wide range of issues and themes for understanding and analyzing African American history, the twentieth century black historical enterprise, and the teaching of African American history for the twenty-first century. Additional topics include the hip-hop generation's relationship to and interpretations of African American history; past, present, and future approaches to the subject; and, the social construct of knowledge in African American historiography. An exclamation of definitions of black history from W. E. B. Du Bois'"The Souls of Black Folk" and a survey of early black women historians lend further dimension and authenticity to the volume. A bold contribution to the growing fields of African American historiography and the philosophy of black history,"African American History Reconsidered" offers numerous analytical frameworks for understanding and delving into a variety of dimensions of the African American historical experience.
[From Amazon.com]
Christopher Lasch was a leading intellectual of the twentieth century. His work consistently probed the nation's political and cultural terrain, considering the unruly thrust of America's history and the possibilities of a better way. Hope in a Scattering Time is the first and only full biography of this towering intellectual figure.
Miller plumbed Lasch's published writings, his correspondence, and interviews and correspondence with his friends, students, and colleagues to create this comprehensive biography. In these pages Eric Miller captures the evolving nature of Lasch's understanding of the world and his fight for clarity and insight in a muddled age.
Christopher Lasch's sharp, prophetic stance caused many in his time to rethink what they thought they had understood, and to consider the world anew. Fifteen years after Lasch's death, the time is ripe to once again follow his lead and to reassess how we view and understand our world.
[From the publisher]
Arguably the leading British historian of his generation, Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) is most celebrated and admired as the author of essays. This volume brings together some of the most original and radical writings of his career—many hitherto inaccessible, one never before published, all demonstrating his piercing intellect, urbane wit, and gift for elegant, vivid narrative. This collection focuses on the writing and understanding of history in the eighteenth century and on the great historians and the intellectual context that inspired or provoked their writings. It combines incisive discussion of such figures as Gibbon, Hume, and Carlyle with broad sweeps of analysis and explication. Essays on the Scottish Enlightenment and the Romantic movement are balanced by intimate portraits of lesser-known historians whose significance Trevor-Roper took particular delight in revealing.
The late Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre of Glanton) was Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford. Among his numerous books is the best-selling The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse.
[From Amazon.com]
Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers’s shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948—that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage.
In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post–Cold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post–World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.
[From the publisher]
Few question the “right turn” America took after 1966, when liberal political power began to wane. But if they did, No Right Turn suggests, they might discover that all was not really “right” with the conservative golden age. A provocative overview of a half century of American politics, the book takes a hard look at the counterrevolutionary dreams of liberalism’s enemies—to overturn people’s reliance on expanding government, reverse the moral and sexual revolutions, and win the Culture War—and finds them largely unfulfilled.
David Courtwright deftly profiles celebrated and controversial figures, from Clare Booth Luce, Barry Goldwater, and the Kennedy brothers to Jerry Falwell, David Stockman, and Lee Atwater. He shows us Richard Nixon’s keen talent for turning popular anxieties about morality and federal meddling to Republican advantage—and his inability to translate this advantage into reactionary policies. Corporate interests, boomer lifestyles, and the media weighed heavily against Nixon and his successors, who placated their base with high-profile attacks on crime, drugs, and welfare dependency. Meanwhile, religious conservatives floundered on abortion and school prayer, obscenity, gay rights, and legalized vices like gambling, and fiscal conservatives watched in dismay as the bills mounted.
We see how President Reagan’s mélange of big government, strong defense, lower taxes, higher deficits, mass imprisonment, and patriotic symbolism proved an illusory form of conservatism. Ultimately, conservatives themselves rebelled against George W. Bush’s profligate brand of Reaganism. Courtwright’s account is both surprising and compelling, a bracing argument against some of our most cherished clichés about recent American history.
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