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189 A Very Brief Bibliographical Essay Even novelists are including bibliographies in their work these days, so while this book is meant for general readers and does not have those troublesome and odd-looking little numbers in the text or the crabbed and overstuffed pages of endnotes, a very brief bibliography is certainly in order. It is part tribute to the works that have inspired the essay above and part guide to the materials I have used. Some of the material comes from thirty-odd years of teaching notes, the time I have been in harness teaching history to college students. I have included passages from other books of mine, including Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, and Fraud in American History (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2003), and Seven Fires: The Urban Infernos That Reshaped America (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). Other bits and pieces came from conversations with friends and colleagues. I have given references in the text to sources quoted but have omitted page numbers when the text is available on the Web. The bibliography indicates the version or translation of the text I used. Readers of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), quotations on pp. 4 and 143, and Edward Hallett Carr’s What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962) will see my debt to their erudition. When I went to graduate school, Carr was the standard short work on historical method. I found it fascinating and still do. Quotations from it come from pp. 33, 35, and 133. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff’s The Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957) was a little dry, but it has gone through multiple editions, so someone out there must be assigning it to classes. Like Barzun and Graff, most of the books students are assigned these days focus solely on methods—how to research a topic, how to prepare a paper, and the like. These come in little sealed packages, “shrink wrapped” with huge and expensive textbooks in history. I’ve even coauthored one myself , Reading and Writing American History, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (2003). A nice, earnest, but not entirely convincing attempt to go beyond deconstruction 190 A Very Brief Bibliographical Essay is Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob’s Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994). I have in the past asked my graduate students to read portions of Peter Novick’s spicy yet morally profound That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The quotation came from p. 17. Finally, those of us who remember Richard Armour’s It All Started with Columbus and It Would Have Startled Columbus (New York: McGraw Hill, 1953) (quotations from pp. 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the former) and Dave Barry’s Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (New York: Random House, 1989) will recognize the tone of respectful irreverence in the pages above. Legal references are courtesy of Lexis.com, combined federal and state cases. The New York Times articles can be found online at www.nytimes. com. The AHA presidential addresses all are online at www.historians.org, the AHA Web site. The chapter epigraphs come from Carl Becker, Detachment and the Writing of History, ed. Phil L. Snyder (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 65, 44, and 157; David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper, 1970), pp. 200, 78 (and on Nevins, pp. 46−47); Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History, rev. ed. (New York: D. C. Heath, 1962), p. 238; Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1935), p. 3; Bernard Bailyn, the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 9, 20−21; Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Postmodernist History” [1994], reprinted in Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, ed. Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch Quinn (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 80; Stephen Ambrose quoted in Susan Larson, “Undaunted Courage,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 6, 2002, Living section, p. 1. Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, ed. H. P. Rickman and translated by B. G. Teubner (1911; repr., New York: Harper, 1962), p. 140, opens the preface, and rightly so, for Dilthey was one of the most profound premodern thinkers about historical method. I am grateful to Monty Python Ltd...

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