The cover of the second edition of Why Study History : Reflecting on the Importance of the Past is here! The book will be available in early 2024....
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historical discipline
David Blight: An “educated and civil society” is “open to each other’s stories” and “open to the essential pluralism of the human drama”
Yale historian David Blight talks about the differences between history and the past on the “Live the Best Version of You” podcast. It is a nice introduction to how historians work and how the work historians do must contribute to...
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A Historian and a Theologian on History and Progress
From the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s, more or less, the search for exemplars gave way to the second approach to history: the projection of progress. History came to be seen as a single linear...
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Should Historians Judge People by the Standards of Their Time?
I get this all the time: “Let’s not judge slaveholders based on present-day morality because they were products of their time.” Indeed, slaveholders were products of their time. The historian’s primary goal is to try to understand them in context...
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Historians and “Perhaps”
After I read Rachel Hermann’s excellent reflection on the word “perhaps” in historical writing I recalled a class I taught five years ago on “Religion and the American Founding.”  I was working on Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction at...
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Clio Among the Muses
Peter’s Hoffer’s latest book, Clio Among the Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities, comes with hearty endorsements from Richard Beeman, Michael Zuckerman, Dan Richter, and Stanley Katz.  Here is a summary: History helps us understand change, provides clues to our...
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