Based on the author's more than 50 years of experience as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is addressed to both aspiring and mature historians. It offers an overview of the state of the discipline of history today and the problems that confront it and its practitioners in many professions. James M. Banner, Jr argues that historians remain inadequately prepared for their rapidly changing professional world and that the discipline as a whole has yet to confront many of its deficiencies. He also argues that, no longer needing to conform automatically to the academic ideal, historians can now more safely and productively than ever before adapt to their own visions, temperaments and goals as they take up their responsibilities as scholars, teachers and public practitioners. Critical while also optimistic, this work suggests many topics for further scholarly and professional exploration, research and debate.
An experienced, multi-faceted historian shows how revisionist history is at the heart of creating historical knowledge "A rallying cry in favor of historians who, revisiting past subjects, change their minds. . . . Rewarding reading."—Kirkus Reviews History is not, and has never been, inert, certain, merely factual, and beyond reinterpretation. Taking readers from Thucydides to the origin of the French Revolution to the Civil War and beyond, James M. Banner, Jr. explores what historians do and why they do it. Banner shows why historical knowledge is unlikely ever to be unchanging, why history as a branch of knowledge is always a search for meaning and a constant source of argument, and why history is so essential to individuals’ awareness of their location in the world and to every group and nation’s sense of identity and destiny. He explains why all historians are revisionists while they seek to more fully understand the past, and how they always bring their distinct minds, dispositions, perspectives, and purposes to bear on the subjects they study.
Based on the author's more than 50 years of experience as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is addressed to both aspiring and mature historians. It offers an overview of the state of the discipline of history today and the problems that confront it and its practitioners in many professions. James M. Banner, Jr argues that historians remain inadequately prepared for their rapidly changing professional world and that the discipline as a whole has yet to confront many of its deficiencies. He also argues that, no longer needing to conform automatically to the academic ideal, historians can now more safely and productively than ever before adapt to their own visions, temperaments and goals as they take up their responsibilities as scholars, teachers and public practitioners. Critical while also optimistic, this work suggests many topics for further scholarly and professional exploration, research and debate.
This provocative analysis of American historiography argues that when scholars use modern racial language to articulate past histories of race and society, they collapse different historical signs of skin color into a transhistorical and essentialist notion of race that implicates their work in the very racial categories they seek to transcend.
In 1960, students supporting civil rights moved into Mississippi and challenged white supremacy by encouraging African Americans to reassert the rights guaranteed them under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The ensuing social upheaval changed the state forever. The author, a former civil rights activist, tells the story of the quest for racial equality in Mississippi. Using a variety of sources as well as his own memories, he weaves together an astonishing account of student protestors and local activists who risked their lives by fighting against southern resistance and federal inaction. Their efforts, and the horrific violence inflicted on them, helped push many non-southerners and the federal government into action, culminating in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act - measures that destroyed legalized segregation and disfranchisement. -- Publisher's description.
A newly revised edition of this classic work, exploring the diverse qualities essential for teaching in today's educational environment. According to Banner and Cannon, to be an effective teacher requires much more than technical skill. Great teaching is an art that combines a wide range of intellectual, moral, and emotional components. This classic work explores the qualities of mind and spirit that are essential for those seeking to help others acquire knowledge and understanding. It analyzes the specific qualities of successful teachers: learning, authority, ethics, order, imagination, tenacity, compassion, patience, character, and pleasure. Written in a clear and engaging style and applicable to all levels of teaching--be it in schools and universities or on athletic fields and in the home--the book encourages teachers to consider how they might enlarge their understanding of the great art of teaching.
This engaging and helpful book is both a thoughtful celebration of the learning process and a practical guide to becoming a better student. Written by the authors of the acclaimed Elements of Teaching, it is designed to help students of all ages—particularly high school and college students—attain their full potential for success in any area of study. James M. Banner, Jr., and Harold C. Cannon explore the qualities needed to get the most out of education: industry, enthusiasm, pleasure, curiosity, aspiration, imagination, self-discipline, civility, cooperation, honesty, and initiative. For each of these elements they offer general reflections, useful suggestions, and a description of a fictional student who either embodies or lacks these qualities. The second part of the book helps students understand the environment in which they learn, by focusing on such topics as teachers, the curriculum, ways of learning, and the transition from school to college. The core points of the text are reinforced by answers to questions that haunt students, as well as tips on what to do to become the best student possible. Throughout, the authors encourage students to consider learning as part of their lives and to be active participants in their own education.
Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, Concise Edition provides students with a clear understanding of how power is gained, lost, and used in both public and private life. This concise version retains the narrative clarity, unparalleled coverage, and thematic unity of the larger text while fashioning an unmatched integration of social and cultural history into a political story. The concise version' s emphasis on clarity and brevity provides a leaner and clearer presentation for introductory American history students. It retains the same strong chronological and thematic framework as the bigger text, but offers a more manageable option for instructors concerned about too much material and too little time.
James M. McPherson is acclaimed as one of the finest historians writing today and a preeminent commentator on the Civil War. Battle Cry of Freedom, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of that conflict, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." Now, in Drawn With the Sword, McPherson offers a series of thoughtful and engaging essays on some of the most enduring questions of the Civil War, written in the masterful prose that has become his trademark. Filled with fresh interpretations, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Drawn With the Sword explores such questions as why the North won and why the South lost (emphasizing the role of contingency in the Northern victory), whether Southern or Northern aggression began the war, and who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or the slaves themselves. McPherson offers memorable portraits of the great leaders who people the landscape of the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant, struggling to write his memoirs with the same courage and determination that marked his successes on the battlefield; Robert E. Lee, a brilliant general and a true gentleman, yet still a product of his time and place; and Abraham Lincoln, the leader and orator whose mythical figure still looms large over our cultural landscape. And McPherson discusses often-ignored issues such as the development of the Civil War into a modern "total war" against both soldiers and civilians, and the international impact of the American Civil War in advancing the cause of republicanism and democracy in countries from Brazil and Cuba to France and England. Of special interest is the final essay, entitled "What's the Matter With History?", a trenchant critique of the field of history today, which McPherson describes here as "more and more about less and less." He writes that professional historians have abandoned narrative history written for the greater audience of educated general readers in favor of impenetrable tomes on minor historical details which serve only to edify other academics, thus leaving the historical education of the general public to films and television programs such as Glory and Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War. Each essay in Drawn With the Sword reveals McPherson's own profound knowledge of the Civil War and of the controversies among historians, presenting all sides in clear and lucid prose and concluding with his own measured and eloquent opinions. Readers will rejoice that McPherson has once again proven by example that history can be both accurate and interesting, informative and well-written. Mark Twain wrote that the Civil War "wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." In Drawn With the Sword, McPherson gracefully and brilliantly illuminates this momentous conflict.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War. In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history. In The Vineyard of Liberty, he combines the color and texture of early American life with meticulous scholarship. Focusing on the tensions leading up to the Civil War, Burns brilliantly shows how Americans became divided over the meaning of Liberty. In The Workshop of Democracy, Burns explores more than a half-century of dramatic growth and transformation of the American landscape, through the addition of dozens of new states, the shattering tragedy of the First World War, the explosion of industry, and, in the end, the emergence of the United States as a new global power. And in The Crosswinds of Freedom, Burns offers an articulate and incisive examination of the US during its rise to become the world’s sole superpower—through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the rapid pace of technological change that gave rise to the “American Century.”
An experienced, multi-faceted historian shows how revisionist history is at the heart of creating historical knowledge "A rallying cry in favor of historians who, revisiting past subjects, change their minds. . . . Rewarding reading."—Kirkus Reviews History is not, and has never been, inert, certain, merely factual, and beyond reinterpretation. Taking readers from Thucydides to the origin of the French Revolution to the Civil War and beyond, James M. Banner, Jr. explores what historians do and why they do it. Banner shows why historical knowledge is unlikely ever to be unchanging, why history as a branch of knowledge is always a search for meaning and a constant source of argument, and why history is so essential to individuals’ awareness of their location in the world and to every group and nation’s sense of identity and destiny. He explains why all historians are revisionists while they seek to more fully understand the past, and how they always bring their distinct minds, dispositions, perspectives, and purposes to bear on the subjects they study.
Benjamin Rush, William Paterson, David Ramsay, Oliver Ellsworth, Jonathan Edwards, Jr.—these are only a few of the remarkable men who attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in its first twenty-one classes. Alumni included five members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, twenty two participants in the Continental Congress, four Senators, seven Congressmen, and two Justices of the Supreme Court. This volume describes the lives of the 338 men who graduated from the College between 1748 and 1768. Their biographies are arranged by year of graduation, and an introduction provides the early history of the College and its role in colonial culture. In sharp contrast to the graduates of other colleges at the time, Princeton's early students were either born or found their later careers in every one of the thirteen states as well as in Tennessee, Kentucky, the West Indies, and Ireland. After graduation most became clergymen, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and soldiers. While some served as national leaders, others rose to prominence in state and local government, becoming governors, state legislators, and participants in the drafting of state constitutions. This record of their lives is a mine of information about America during the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National periods. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A Pulitzer Prize winner looks at the course of American history from the birth of the Constitution to the dawn of the Civil War. The years between 1787 and 1863 witnessed the development of the American Nation—its society, politics, customs, culture, and, most important, the development of liberty. Burns explores the key events in the republic’s early decades, as well as the roles of heroes from Washington to Lincoln and of lesser-known figures. Captivating and insightful, Burns’s history combines the color and texture of early American life with meticulous scholarship. Focusing on the tensions leading up to the Civil War, Burns brilliantly shows how Americans became divided over the meaning of Liberty. Vineyard of Liberty is a sweeping and engrossing narrative of America’s formative years.
Based on the author's more than 50 years of experience as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is addressed to both aspiring and mature historians. It offers an overview of the state of the discipline of history today and the problems that confront it and its practitioners in many professions. James M. Banner, Jr argues that historians remain inadequately prepared for their rapidly changing professional world and that the discipline as a whole has yet to confront many of its deficiencies. He also argues that, no longer needing to conform automatically to the academic ideal, historians can now more safely and productively than ever before adapt to their own visions, temperaments and goals as they take up their responsibilities as scholars, teachers and public practitioners. Critical while also optimistic, this work suggests many topics for further scholarly and professional exploration, research and debate.
This engaging and helpful book is both a thoughtful celebration of the learning process and a practical guide to becoming a better student. Written by the authors of the acclaimed Elements of Teaching, it is designed to help students of all ages—particularly high school and college students—attain their full potential for success in any area of study. James M. Banner, Jr., and Harold C. Cannon explore the qualities needed to get the most out of education: industry, enthusiasm, pleasure, curiosity, aspiration, imagination, self-discipline, civility, cooperation, honesty, and initiative. For each of these elements they offer general reflections, useful suggestions, and a description of a fictional student who either embodies or lacks these qualities. The second part of the book helps students understand the environment in which they learn, by focusing on such topics as teachers, the curriculum, ways of learning, and the transition from school to college. The core points of the text are reinforced by answers to questions that haunt students, as well as tips on what to do to become the best student possible. Throughout, the authors encourage students to consider learning as part of their lives and to be active participants in their own education.
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