One of my favorite historical writers on one of my favorite historical writers. Listen to Eyal Press’s interview with Perlstein here. Here is a taste of the transcript: Eyal Press: No question as someone who grew up in Buffalo, I...
Garry Wills
*Harper’s Magazine* publishes “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”
This letter will appear in the October 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Signers include Anne Applebaum, Margaret Atwood, David Blight, David Brooks, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Early, David Frum, Francis Fukuyama, Todd Gitlin, Anthony Grafton, David Greenberg, Jonathan Haidt, Michael...
Garry Wills on Patriarchy and the Discrimination of Women in the Academy
Historian and writer Garry Wills has seen a lot in his day. His has been observing the academic world for six decades. In his recent revealing piece in The New York Review of Books, Wills reflects on the role of women...
Even More Historians Talk About the Trump Presidency
Scott Berg, Robert Dallek, Jon Meacham, Edmund Morris, Stacy Schiff, and Garry Wills all reflect on the Trump presidency in this piece at Vanity Fair. Here is Schiff: Eighty-seven years before the American Revolution, the New England elite lost their patience...
What Should We Make of the Gettysburg Address?
Today we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln came to south central Pennsylvania, about thirty miles from where I am sitting as I write this post, to dedicate a national cemetery in...
Garry Wills: “America’s Best Living Explainer”
Sam Tanenhaus has written a fascinating sketch of writer and historian Garry Wills. He describes him as “America’s best living explainer” and “an outsider, a practising Catholic, a proud midwesterner, a cheerful iconoclast who has infuriated friends on both the...
Is Garry Wills a Catholic?
Can a Catholic reject the priesthood, the papacy, transubstantiation, and extreme unction? Garry Wills, author of Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition, thinks so. He actually sounds like a low-church evangelical here. (And I almost didn’t recognize him without his glasses). […]