Record keeping redirects here.

Herodotus (5th century BC), one of the earliest nameable historians whose work survives.

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it.^[1] Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is concerned with events preceding written history, the individual is a historian of prehistory. Although "historian" can be used to describe amateur and professional historians alike, it is reserved more recently for those who have acquired graduate degrees in the discipline.^[2] Some historians, though, are recognized by equivalent training and experience in the field.^[2] "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century at roughly the same time that physicians also set standards for whom could enter the field.

Objective historian[link]

During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial it became evident that the court need to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus".^[3]

Justice Charles Gray leant heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, who compared illegitimate distortion of the historical record practice by holocaust deniers with established historical methodologies.^[4]

In summarising Gray's judgement, Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian:^[5]

1. She must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
2. she must not dismiss counterevidence without scholarly consideration;
3. she must be even-handed in her treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
4. she must clearly indicate any speculation;
5. she must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
6. she must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict her favored view; and
7. she must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.

History analysis[link]

The process of historical analysis involves investigation and analysis of competing ideas, facts and purported facts to create coherent narratives that explain "what happened" and "why or how it happened". Modern historical analysis usually draws upon other social sciences, including economics, sociology, politics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and linguistics. While ancient writers do not normally share modern historical practices, their work remains valuable for its insights within the cultural context of the times. An important part of the contribution of many modern historians is the verification or dismissal of earlier historical accounts through reviewing newly discovered sources and recent scholarship or through parallel disciplines like archaeology.

Historiography[link]

St. Nestor the Chronicler, the first Russian historiographer (by Viktor Vasnetsov).

Ancient[link]

Herodotus and Thucydides were as the founders of the discipline of history. Concerning Herodotus (5th century BC), one of the earliest historians whose work survives, his recount of strange and unusual tales are gripping but not necessarily representative of the historical record. Despite this, The Histories of Herodotus displays many of the techniques of more modern historians. He interviewed witnesses, evaluated oral histories, studied multiple sources and then pronounced his particular version. Herodotus's works covered what was then the entire known world of the Greeks, or at least the part regarded as worthy of study, i.e., the peoples surrounding the Mediterranean. Herodotus was also known for visiting the various battle sites he wrote about, including the battle of Thermopylae. About 25 years after Herodotus, Thucydides, perhaps the most important of historians, pioneered a different form of history, one much closer to reportage. In his work, History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote about a single long conflict that lasted 27 years between Athens and Sparta with its origins and results. But, as it was mainly within living memory and Thucydides himself was alive throughout the conflict and a participant in many of the events, there was less room for myths and tall tales. Moreover, he included transcriptions of speeches that were delivered by historic figures, although sometimes they were made up by Thucydides himself according to what those people should have said at the moment they delivered them.^[6]

Other noteworthy and famous Greek historians include Plutarch (2nd century AD), who wrote several biographies, the Parallel Lives, in which he wanted to assess the morality of its characters by comparing them in pairs, and Polybius (3nd century BC), who developed Thucydides's method further, becoming one of the most objective historians of classical antiquity. Polybius is also credited for being the first historian to write a History of the World, and to offer argued explanations and interpretations of history facts, and not only a record of them. The most important Roman historian of the classical world was Tacitus (late 1st and early 2nd century AD). The foremost Roman historian, he wrote an extremely influential account on Rome in the first century, the Annals. Due to his literary style and the thoroughness of his research—which seemingly included studying Roman imperial archives and heavily relying on Thucydides—and his apparent rigor—for he tended not to support any character or subject, taking an impartial point of view—he was by far the most read and admired historian during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Modern Era. Thus, his historian style has been imitated all through the ages, and had a strong impact in Edward Gibbon and Montesquieu.

Polybius, one of the first historians to attempt to present history as a sequence of causes and effects, carefully conducted his research—partly based on what he saw and partly on the communications of eye-witnesses and the participants in the events.^[7]

India[link]

India has a long record of historiography with chronicles being maintained by dynasties, monks and communities. The texts of ancient and medieval India are in verse, unlike Europe where serious work in history was in prose. The Vedas, Puranas and the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata narrate many events in ancient India although not always in a linear fashion. The Mahabharata is in fact an epic centered mainly around the House of the Kurus, who ruled a large part of northern India. It was progressively called Jai, Vijaya, Bharata and finally Mahabharata. The Puranas are also chronicles of past events and owe their name to the Sanskrit word Purah ( Before ). Jain and Buddhist monks also chronicled many events in ancient India in their scriptures.^[8]

China[link]

Sima Qian (145-86 BC), a Prefect of the Grand Scribes (太史令) of the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD), is regarded as the father of Chinese historiography because of his universal history, the Records of the Grand Historian (史記). It provides an overview of the history of China covering more than two thousand years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to Sima's contemporary Emperor Han Wudi (漢武帝). His work laid the foundation for the Twenty-Four Histories which, unlike Sima's independent endeavor, were government-sponsored works usually commissioned by new dynastic houses after the conquest of the previous dynasty.^[9]

Arabs[link]

Ibn Abd-el-Hakem was an Egyptian who wrote the History of the Conquest of Egypt and North Africa and Spain, which was the earliest Arab account of the Islamic conquests of those countries. Much like Herodotus' works, it mixes facts with legends, and was often quoted by later Islamic historians. Al-Jahiz was a famous Arab scholar and historian. Hamdani, an Arab historian, was the best representative of Islamic culture during the last effective years of the Abbasid caliphate. Ali al-Masudi was an Arab historian, known as the "Herodotus of the Arabs." Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a famous Arab Muslim historian who engaged in historiography philosophy of history. He is best known for his Muqaddimah "Prolegomenon".^[10]

Enlightenment[link]

Voltaire was a highly influential historian during The Enlightenment; he stressed the need to move away from great men and to study the people and their culture. Sakmann points out that he complained that too much historical writing combined boring detail, outrageous lies, and narrow-minded presentation. Good history, Voltaire argued, agrees with reason and natural science, and is based on the corroborating evidence.^[11] Equally influential was Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). His wide-ranging Spirit of the Laws (1748) spanned legal, geographical, cultural, economic, political and philosophical studies and was greatly influential in forging the fundamentally interdisciplinary historian.^[12] Often called "the first modern historian", the English scholar Edward Gibbon wrote his magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788).^[13]

19th century Germany[link]

Modern historiographical techniques were dramatically advanced in the German universities of the 19th century. Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886) was a founder of modern source-based historiography. His research seminar for graduate students set professional standards for historical training at the University of Berlin (1824 - 1871). His many books demonstrated how to rely upon primary sources in writing narrative history on international politics (Aussenpolitik). He dug through the archives of Europe, especially those of the Vatican and Venice, whose ambassadors followed events very closely and reported on them at length. Ranke thus sent the research to the archives for primary sources; there he should transcend his personal predispositions and parochial loyalties, and write objective history "wie es ezgentlich gewesen" ("as it actually happened.")^[14] Highly influential German classicists historians were Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)^[15] Historians of Germany included Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-84), Heinrich von Sybel (1817-95), and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96). They deliberately avoided social, economic, and cultural topics because they might undermine the national political development which their writing celebrated. Von Sybel in 1859 founded the Historische Zeitschrift^[16], which set the world standard for a scholarly history journal.

Twentieth-century developments[link]

The whig approach emphasizes the origins of today's positive political features, with history seen as a force that pushes society forward. It studies the past with reference to the present."^[17]

Since the 1960s, academic history has seen the emergence of new approaches and topics such as social history, demographic history, ethnic history, women's history, environmental history and cultural history.^[18] There has been a shift of emphasis away from national topics to the experiences of ordinary people. For example, labor history has shifted away from the study of union leaders to the study of the workers. Slavery studies used to be about debates among politicians. In Roll, Jordan, Roll, historian Eugene D. Genovese ignored all that and focused on the interaction on the plantation between slaves and their owners. Edward Said's Orientalism examines how and why Western societies came to consider non-Western ones as inherently inferior.

While there has been a flowering of new historical approaches and microscopic studies there has been much less attention to the pre-1960 staple of teaching, the development of one's own nation state and its values and practices. As historians provide highly detailed narratives of increasingly smaller subjects there is less concern for the larger picture of the meaning of it all. Fewer historians try to tackle all of the various historiographies relevant to a broader interpretive or analytic synthesis, and some suggest that a post-modern perspectives does not allow any real synthesis. On the other hand many scholars have been calling for a "new synthesis" in American history for years. Thomas H. Bender has argued that synthesis raises its own unresolved issues such as teleology, causation, agency, and subjective meaning; and inclusion and exclusion.^[19] Richard D. Brown worries that if historians fail to synthesize they, "run the risk of confirming the anti-academic canard that "historians know more and more about less and less."^[20]

Education and profession[link]

An undergraduate history degree is often used as a stepping stone to graduate studies in business or law. Many historians are employed at universities and other facilities for post-secondary education.^[21] In addition, it is normal for colleges and universities to require the PhD degree for new full-time hires, and a Masters degree for part-timers. Publication is increasingly required by smaller schools, so graduate papers become journal articles and PhD dissertations become published monographs. The graduate student experience is difficult—those who finish take on average 8 or more years; funding is scarce except at a few very rich universities. Being a teaching assistant in a course is required in some programs; in others it is a paid opportunity awarded a fraction of the students. Until the 1980s it was rare for graduate programs to teach how to teach; the assumption was that teaching was easy and that learning how to do research was the main mission.^[22][23]

Professional historians typically work in colleges and universities, archival centers, government agencies, museums, and as freelance writers and consultants.^[24] The job market for new PhDs in history is poor and getting worse, with many relegated to part-time "adjunct" teaching jobs with low pay and no benefits.^[25]

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Historians

• Antiquarian
• Auxiliary sciences of history
• Historiography
• List of historians
• List of historians by area of study

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

• The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (ed. by Mary Beth Norton and Pamela Gerardi (3rd ed. 2 vol, Oxford U.P. 1995) 2064 pages; annotated guide to 27,000 of the most important English language history books in all fields and topics vol 1 online, vol 2 online
• Allison, William Henry. A guide to historical literature (1931) comprehensive bibliography for scholarship to 1930. online edition
• Barnes, Harry Elmer. A history of historical writing‎ (1962)
• Barraclough, Geoffrey. History: Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences, (1978)
• Bentley, Michael. ed., Companion to Historiography, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0415285577990pp; 39 chapters by experts
• Bender, Thomas, et al. The Education of Historians for Twenty-first Century (2003) report by the Committee on Graduate Education of the American Historical Association
• Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 3rd edition, 2007, ISBN 0-226-07278-9
• Boia, Lucian et al., eds. Great Historians of the Modern Age: An International Dictionary (1991)
• Cannon, John, et al., eds. The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians. Blackwell Publishers, 1988 ISBN 0-631-14708-X.
• Gilderhus, Mark T. History an Historiographical Introduction, 2002, ISBN 0-13-044824-9
• Iggers, Georg G. Historiography in the 20th Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (2005)
• Kelly, Boyd, ed. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. (1999). Fitzroy Dearborn ISBN 1-884964-33-8
• Kramer, Lloyd, and Sarah Maza, eds. A Companion to Western Historical Thought Blackwell 2006. 520pp; ISBN 978-1-4051-4961-7.
• Todd, Richard B. ed. Dictionary of British Classicists, 1500–1960, (2004). Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004 ISBN 1-85506-997-0.
• Woolf D. R. A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities) (2 vol 1998) excerpt and text search

External links[link]

Look up historian in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Selected texts by the most known historians

Elizabeth Kostova
Born	(1964-12-26) December 26, 1964 (age 47) New London, Connecticut,  United States
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University University of Michigan
Period	1980–present
Genres	Historical, Gothic
Notable work(s)	The Historian
Influences Bram Stoker

Elizabeth Johnson Kostova (born December 26, 1964) is an American author best known for her debut novel The Historian.

Early life[link]

Elizabeth Z. Johnson was born in New London, Connecticut and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee where she graduated from the Webb School of Knoxville. She received her undergraduate degree from Yale University^[1] and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, where she won the 2003 Hopwood Award for her Novel-in-Progress.^[2] She is married to a Bulgarian scholar.

[edit] The Historian

Kostova's interest in the Dracula legend began with the stories her father told her about the vampire when she was a child.^[3] The family lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1972, while her father was teaching at a local university; during that year, the family traveled across Europe. According to Kostova, "It was the formative experience of my childhood."^[4][5] She "was fascinated by [her father's Dracula stories] because they were ... from history in a way, even though they weren't about real history, but I heard them in these beautiful historic places."^[3] Kostova's interest in books and libraries began early as well. Her mother, a librarian, frequently took her and her sisters to the public library—they were each allowed to check out 30 books and had a special shelf for their library books.^[6]

As a child, she listened to recordings of Bulgarian folk music and became interested in the tradition. As an undergraduate at Yale, she sang in and directed a Slavic chorus.^[1] In 1989, she and some friends traveled to Eastern Europe, specifically Bulgaria and Bosnia, to study local musical customs. The recordings they made will be deposited in the Library of Congress.^[1] While Kostova was in Europe, the Berlin Wall collapsed, heralding the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, events which shaped her understanding of history.^[1]

Five years later, in 1994, when Kostova was hiking in the Appalachian Mountains with her husband, she had a flashback to those storytelling moments with her father and asked herself "what if the father were spinning his Dracula tales to his entranced daughter and Dracula was listening in? What if Dracula was still alive?"^[5][7] She immediately scratched out seven pages of notes into her writer's notebook. Two days later, she started work on the novel.^[7] At the time she was teaching English as a second language, creative writing, and composition classes at universities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and finished the book as she was obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan.^[1][8] In order to write the book, she did extensive research about Eastern Europe and Vlad Ţepeş.

Kostova finished the novel in January 2004 and sent it out to a potential literary agent in March.^[5] Two months later and within two days of sending out her manuscript to publishers, Kostova was offered a deal—she refused it.^[9] The rights to the book were then auctioned off and Little, Brown and Company bought it for US$2 million (US$30,000 is typical for a first novel from an unknown author^[10]). Publishers Weekly explained the high price as a bidding war between firms believing that they might have the next Da Vinci Code within their grasp. One vice-president and associate publisher said "Given the success of The Da Vinci Code, everybody around town knows how popular the combination of thriller and history can be and what a phenomenon it can become."^[11] Little, Brown, and Co. subsequently sold the rights in 28 countries.^[12] The book was published in the United States on 14 June 2005.

The novel blends the history and folklore of Vlad Ţepeş and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula and has been described as a combination of genres, including Gothic novel, adventure novel, detective fiction, travelogue, postmodern historical novel, epistolary epic, and historical thriller. Kostova was intent on writing a serious work of literature and saw herself as an inheritor of the Victorian style.^[3] Although based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Historian is not a horror novel, but rather an eerie tale.^[4][13] The novel is concerned with questions about history, its role in society, and how it is represented in books, as well as the nature of good and evil.^[9] As Kostova explains, "Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history."^[9][14] The evils brought about by religious conflict are a particular theme and the novel explores the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic East.^[15][16]

Little, Brown, and Company heavily promoted the book and it became the first debut novel to land at number one on The New York Times bestseller list and as of 2005 was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US history.^[3][17] In general, the reviews of the novel were mixed.^[18] Several reviewers noted that she described the setting of her novel well.^[19][20] However, some reviewers criticized the book's structure and its lack of tonal variety.^[21] Kostova received the 2006 Book Sense award for Best Adult Fiction and the 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year.^[22][23] Sony bought the film rights to the novel for $1.5 million.^[3]

Current[link]

In May 2007, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation was created. The Foundation helps support Bulgarian creative writing, the translation of contemporary Bulgarian literature into English, and friendship between Bulgarian authors and American and British authors.^[24]

Kostova released her second novel The Swan Thieves on January 12, 2010.

Novels[link]

• The Historian (2005)
• The Swan Thieves (2009)

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Elizabeth Kostova Official Website
• Elizabeth Kostova Foundation
• Works by or about Elizabeth Kostova in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Robert Caro
Caro, 2009
Born	Robert Allan Caro (1935-10-30) October 30, 1935 (age 76) New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Biographer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Princeton University
Genres	Non-fiction
Notable work(s)	The Power Broker The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Spouse(s)	Ina Caro
www.robertacaro.com

Robert Allan Caro (born October 30, 1935) is an American journalist and author known for his celebrated biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson.

After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker (1974), a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a biography of the former president.

For his biographies, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography, the National Book Award, the Francis Parkman Prize (awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that "best exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist") two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the H.L. Mencken Award, the Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters.

Life and career[link]

Caro was born in New York City, New York, the son of Cele (née Mendelow) and Benjamin Caro.^[1] He "grew up on Central Park West at 94th Street. His father, a businessman, spoke Yiddish as well as English, but he didn’t speak either very often. He was 'very silent,' Caro said, and became more so after Caro’s mother died, after a long illness, when he [Caro] was 12." It was his mother’s deathbed wish that he should go to the Horace Mann School, an exclusive private school in the Riverdale section of The Bronx. As a student there, Caro translated an edition of his school newspaper into Russian and mailed 10,000 copies to students in the USSR. He graduated in 1953.^[2] He went on to Princeton University, where he majored in English. He became managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, second to R.W. Apple, Jr., later a prominent editor at The New York Times.^[3]

His writings, both in class and out, had been lengthy since his years at Horace Mann. A short story he wrote for The Princeton Tiger, the school's humor magazine, took up almost an entire issue. His senior thesis on existentialism in Hemingway was so long, Caro claims, that the university's English department subsequently established a maximum length for senior theses by its students. He graduated in 1957.^[3]

According to a 2012 New York Times Magazine profile, "Caro said he now thinks that Princeton, which he chose because of its parties, was one of his mistakes, and that he should have gone to Harvard. Princeton in the mid-1950s was hardly known for being hospitable toward Jews, and though Caro says he did not personally suffer from anti-Semitism, he saw plenty of students who did." He had a sports column in the Princetonian and also wrote for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine.^[3] He was a Carnegie Fellow at Columbia University and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Caro began his professional career as a reporter with the New Brunswick Daily Home News (now merged into the Home News Tribune) in New Jersey. He took a brief leave to work for the Middlesex County Democratic Party as a publicist. He left politics after an incident where he was accompanying the party chair to polling places on election day. A police officer reported to the party chair that some African-Americans Caro saw being loaded into a police van, under arrest, were poll watchers who "had been giving them some trouble." Caro left politics right there. "I still think about it," he recalled in the 2012 Times Magazine profile. "It wasn't the roughness of the police that made such an impression. It was the—meekness isn't the right word—the acceptance of those people of what was happening."^[3]

From there he went on to six years as an investigative reporter with the Long Island newspaper Newsday. One of the articles he wrote was a long series about why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay, championed by Robert Moses, would have been inadvisable, requiring piers so large it would disrupt tidal flows in the sound, among other problems. Caro believed that his work had influenced even the state's powerful governor Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider the idea, until he saw the state's Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge.^[3]

"That was one of the transformational moments of my life," Caro said years later. It led him to think about Moses for the first time. "I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: 'Everything you've been doing is baloney. You've been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here's a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don't have the slightest idea how he got it.'"^[3]

Work[link]

[edit] The Power Broker

Caro spent the academic year of 1966-1967 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. During a class on urban planning and land use, the experience of watching Moses returned to him.

They were talking one day about highways and where they got built...and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: "This is completely wrong. This isn't why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don't find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest."^[3]

To do so, Caro began work on a biography of Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, also a study of Caro's favorite theme: the acquisition and use of power. He expected it would take nine months to complete, but instead it took him until 1974.^[3] The work was based on extensive research and 522 interviews, including seven interviews with Moses himself, several with Michael Madigan (who worked for Moses for 35 years); and numerous interviews with Sidney Shapiro (Moses's General Manager for forty years); as well as interviews with men who worked for and knew Moses’s mentor, New York Governor Al Smith.

His wife Ina functioned as his research assistant. Her master's thesis on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stemmed from this work. At one point she sold the family home and took a teaching job so Robert would be financially able to finish the book.^[3]

The Power Broker is widely viewed [2] as a seminal work because it combined painstaking historical research with a smoothly flowing narrative writing style. The success of this approach was evident in his chapter on the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, where Caro reported the controversy from all perspectives, including that of neighborhood residents. The result was a work of powerful literary as well as academic interest.

[edit] The Years of Lyndon Johnson

Following this success, Caro turned his attention to Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro retraced Johnson's life by temporarily moving to rural Texas and Washington, D.C., in order to better understand Johnson's upbringing and to interview anyone who had known Johnson. The work, entitled The Years of Lyndon Johnson, is projected to run to five volumes:

1. The first, The Path to Power (1982), covers Johnson's life up to his failed 1941 campaign for the United States Senate.
2. The second volume, Means of Ascent (1990), commences in the aftermath of that defeat and continues through his election to that office in 1948.
3. The third volume, Master of the Senate (2002), chronicles Johnson's rapid ascent and rule as Senate Majority Leader.
4. The fourth volume, The Passage of Power (2012), covers LBJ's life from 1958 to 1964.
5. In November 2011, Robert Caro also announced that the full project had expanded to five volumes with the fifth volume requiring another two to three years to write.^[4][5][6]

Caro's books portray Johnson as a most complex and contradictory character: at the same time a scheming opportunist and visionary progressive. Caro argued, for example, that Johnson's victory in the 1948 runoff for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate was only achieved through extensive fraud and ballot box stuffing, though this is set in the practices of the time and in the context of Johnson's previous defeat in his 1941 race for the Senate. Caro also highlighted some of Johnson's campaign contributions, such as those from the Texas construction firm Brown and Root; in 1962 the company was acquired by another Texas firm, Halliburton, which became a major contractor in the Vietnam War. In addition, Caro argued that Johnson was awarded the Silver Star in World War II mainly for political reasons, and that he later lied to journalists and the public about the circumstances for which it was awarded. Caro's portrayal of Johnson also notes his struggles on behalf of progressive causes such as the Voting Rights Act, and his consummate skill in getting this enacted in spite of intense opposition from certain Southern Senators.

Amongst sources close to the late president, Johnson's widow Lady Bird Johnson "spoke to [Caro] several times and then abruptly stopped without giving a reason, and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, has never consented to be interviewed, but most of Johnson’s closest friends, including John Connally and George Christian, Johnson’s last press secretary, who spoke to Caro practically on his deathbed, have gone on the record".^[3]

Publisher-editor[link]

Caro's books have been published by Alfred A. Knopf, first under editor in chief Robert Gottlieb and then by Sonny Mehta, "who took over the Johnson project — enthusiastically — after Gottlieb’s departure in 1987." Gottlieb, five years Caro's senior, suggested the Johnson project to Caro in 1974 in preference to the planned follow-up to the Moses volume, a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia that was thence abandoned.^[7] The ex-President had recently died and Caro was also decided, before meeting with Gottlieb on the subject, to undertake the Texan's biography; he "wanted to write about power." Gottlieb has continued as editor of Caro's books since leaving Knopf and excerpted Volume 2 of the Johnson biography at The New Yorker when he was editor in chief there.^[3]

Awards[link]

For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize.

In October 2007, Caro was named a "Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor" at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany but then was unable to attend.

In 2010, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, the highest award in the humanities given in this country. Delivering remarks at the end of the ceremony, the President said, "I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was 22 years old and just being mesmerized, and I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics."^[8] In 2011, Robert Caro was the recipient of the 2011 BIO Award given each year by members of Biographers International "to a colleague who had made a major contribution in the advancement of the art and craft of real life depiction."^[9]

• 1964 — The Society of Silurians Award for outstanding achievement in the field of Public Service History for a series entitled “Misery Acres”, exposing fraudulent real estate sales by mail
• 1964 — The Deadline Club for outstanding newspaper reporting
• 1965 — The Deadline Club for outstanding newspaper reporting
• 1965-1966 — Nieman W. Lucius Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University Nieman Foundation
• 1975 — Washington Monthly American Political Book Award (The Power Broker)
• 1975 — The Francis Parkman Prize awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best “exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist”^{[citation needed]} (The Power Broker)
• 1975 — The Pulitzer Prize for Biography (The Power Broker)^[10]
• 1975 — AIA Special Citation
• 1982 — The National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year (The Path to Power)
• 1983 — The Blue Pencil Award from the Columbia Daily Spectator
• 1983 — American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
• 1983 — The Carr P. Collins Award from the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters (The Path to Power)
• 1983 — The Mencken Award for the best book of 1982 (The Path to Power)
• 1986 — The Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Art and Letters
• 1991 — Washington Monthly American Political Book Award (Means of Ascent)
• 1990 — The National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year (Means of Ascent)
• 2002 — The Power Broker was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century.
• 2002 — The National Book Award (Master of the Senate)^[11]
• 2003 — The Los Angeles Times Book Award in Non-Fiction (Master of the Senate)
• 2003 — The Carl Sandberg Award in Literature (Master of the Senate)
• 2003 — The John Steinbeck Award in literature (Master of the Senate)
• 2003 — The Pulitzer Prize for Biography (Master of the Senate)^[10]
• 2010 — Inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame
• 2010 — The National Humanities Medal

Family[link]

Caro has described his wife, Ina Caro, as "the whole team" on all four of his books. She sold their house and took a job teaching school to fund work on The Power Broker and is the only person other than himself who conducted research for his books.^[12]

Ina is also the author of The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France, a book which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "the essential traveling companion... for all who love France and its history".^{[citation needed]} Newsweek reviewer Peter Prescott commented, "I'd rather go to France with Ina Caro than with Henry Adams or Henry James. The unique premise of her intelligent and discerning book is so startling that it’s a wonder no one has thought of it before."^[13] Ina frequently writes about their travels through France in her Paris to the Past blog. In June 2011, W. W. Norton published her second book, Paris to the Past: Traveling through French History by Train.

The Caros have a son, Chase, who is in the information-technology business.

Caro has a younger sibling, Michael, who is now a retired real estate manager.^[3]

Pop culture references[link]

In the television series The Simpsons, the episode "Treehouse of Horror XVI" features the character Lisa seen reading Master of the Senate in the vignette "Bart A.I."

In the 2004 film The Stepford Wives, Nicole Kidman's character attends a book club meeting with the Stepford Wives and attempts to discuss the third volume of Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson but the group chooses to review a book of Christmas crafts.

Bibliography[link]

• Caro, Robert A., The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. 1974. Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394480767). ix + 1246 pp. + xxxiv pp.: illus.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. 1982. Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394499735). xxiii + 882 p. + 48 p. of plates: illus.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. 1990. Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New York. (ISBN 0394528352). xxxiv + 506 pp.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. 2002. Alfred A. Knopf Inc, New York. (ISBN 0-394-52836-0). xxiv + 1167 pp.
• Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power. 2012. Alfred A. Knopf Inc, New York. (ISBN 978-0679405070). 752 pp.

References[link]

• Zinsser, William Knowlton (ed.), Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-48617-3

External links[link]

• Official website
• Caro, Robert A., Article on Robert Moses and the writing of The Power Broker, The New Yorker, January 5, 1998.
• Meis, Morgan, Short essay about Caro, 3quarksdaily.blogs.com.
• Robert Caro discusses a volume of his biography of President Johnson, LOC.gov video.
• Darman, Jonathan, "The Marathon Man", Newsweek, Feb. 16, 2009.
• "Robert Caro: Understanding Power", documentary on the life of Robert Caro, youtube.
• Booknotes interview with Caro on Means of Ascent, April 29, 1990
• In Depth interview with Caro, April 7, 2002
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Caro about the writing of his fourth volume, January 4, 2009
• Part one of C-SPAN Q&A interview with Caro about the finished book, The Passage of Power, May 6, 2012
  • Part two of C-SPAN Q&A interview with Caro about The Passage of Power, May 20, 2012
• Caro appears as an on camera expert in New York: A Documentary Film (1999) directed by Ric Burns for PBS.
• 2012 radio interview (47 minutes) at The Bat Segundo Show
• Jones, Chris, "The Big Book", profile in Esquire, May 2012.