This is the grave of Francis Parkman. Born in Boston in 1823, Parkman grew up in the region’s elite. His father was one of the city’s leading Unitarian ministers. He was a sickly boy and s
One of the most annoying things about being a historian that every random person on the street thinks they know more than you do about it. It really does drive me nuts. Luckily, I am very, very good a
There aren’t a lot of historians who deserve what some might see as hyperbolic language. By and large, most of us just build on each other, slightly shift a literature, and contribute to the bro
This is the grave of Peggy Pascoe. One of the finest historians of the 1980s and 1990s, Pascoe was a pioneer in women’s history and legal history, particularly in the American West. In the 1980s
Jefferson Cowie has an excellent essay on how labor historians totally missed Trump. And he’s right–it’s that way too many labor historians have huge ideological blinders that romant
A journalist called up David Blight, one of the greatest living historians of the Civil War, and asked him what he thought of Trump’s Andrew Jackson comments. Blight clearly hadn’t heard o
James Green, preeminent labor historian, has died. His books reached far beyond the academy to transform popular understanding of the United States’ most dramatic labor incidents. Probably his m
Gordon Wood is an esteemed historian of the American Revolution. He’s probably most famous for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which was popular but not universally acclaimed due to t