I am reading Obama’s memoir A Promised Land with my daughter. Actually, Caroline is listening to the audio version and I am reading the text. She is about a chapter ahead of me. This morning we exchanged notes at lunch....
From From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story: A crude statement of how I would read my own life goes as follows. From internalizing such preaching about what I needed to do in order to...
Over at Bald Blogger, Phil Sinitiere has posted a very nice list of memoirs written by academics, historians, and other assorted intellectuals. Here is his introduction to the list: Over the last decade or so, I have taken a particular...
Randall Stephens continues his series with notable historians. This time around he interviews David D. Hall, the Harvard Divinity School historian and dean of “popular” and “lived” religion. My favorite Hall books are Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular...
Randall Stephens asks Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jack Rakove why he became a historian. The interview is part of a series Randall is starting at The Historical Society blog in which he asks prominent historians how they got their start. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYdqobXN5Pw&w=640&h=390]
Like Randall Stephens, I love reading historian’s memoirs and autobiographies.. (Although I must admit that I did not make it very far in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s diaries before I was put off by his pomposity). Stephens has a great post […]
I have long been a fan of autobiographies of intellectuals and historians. After reading Dwight Gardner’s review of Garry Wills’s memoir Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer, I want to go out and get a copy. For those who […]
Christine Kelly, a student of mine, recently returned from New York City where she participated in the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History Scholars Program. This highly competitive program brings top undergraduates from around the country to New York to spend...
I came across this old post (March 2010–old at least by blogging standards) when I was browsing The Juvenile Instructor, an excellent blog dealing with Mormon history. The post is by Steve Fleming, a graduate student in religious studies at...
The London Review of Books is running a fabulous article by Keith Thomas, the noted historian of early modern England and the author of, among many other books, Religion and the Decline of Magic. Thomas talks about how he writes....
Richard A. Kauffman, the book review editor at Christian Century, writes: Much ink has been spilled over the current popularity of memoirs. It’s too easy to write them off as expressions of American self-infatuation. Many memoirs are self-absorbed, and some...
Who is William Moraley and why is he coming to America? As the editors of Moraley’s memoir, Susan Klepp and Billy Smith write: “William Moraley ventured from England to the colonies in 1729 as an indentured servant, worked in various […]
Today I finished teaching Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. My goal in teaching this text is two-fold. First, I want my students to see Franklin as the embodiment of the Enlightenment in America. I want them to understand Franklin’s intellectual, cultural, and...
