Animating History:
The Biographical Pulse
David H. Burton
This volume of collected essays intends to highlight the interaction of people and ideas. The grouping of essays focuses on the relationship of people and events. Considered altogether, this collection regards lives observed as a source of historical insight. Yet this bias depends intrinsically on the historical era. History, therefore, remains very close to the center of each piece.
Burton's attachment to a biographical approach to both intellectual and political history, and to diplomatic and gender history, comes from viewing the past as people-dominated. It does not eschew a history of movements or of grand patterns; it only takes them for granted and in doing so elevates the persons involved to a level of importance possibly otherwise obscured. Burton persuasively argues it is hard to imagine history without people, famous or obscure, and equally difficult to make sense of people outside of the history of their times.
David H. Burton is professor emeritus of history at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He is the General Editor of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft. His American History-British Historians (1976) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and The Learned Presidency was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books of 1988.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
1 Interfacing Science and Biography
Werner Heisenberg
Theodore Roosevelt
2 Ideas and Men
John Adams
E.A. Robinson
3 Why Plutarch?
Winston Churchill
Franklin Roosevelt
4 Ideas and Women
Clara Barton
Mary Ritter Beard
5 Historic Friendships: Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Patrick Augustine Sheehan, Holmes, Pollock, and Laski
6 The Anglo-American Rapprochement
Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents
7 Jesuit Presence, Time and Place
Fathers Harding and Molyneux
Fathers Lucey, Ford and Gregg
8 Biography / Autobiography
Chief Justice Taft
9 Summing Up
2007, 372 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-916101-75-6 (Paper over board) $ 45.00