Artful History

“Good history can also be great literature. The essays in Artful History rupture the tired preconception that scrupulous history need be dry and dull with their powerful evocations of the vanished world of the past."—Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History

“Seventeen excellent writers who are also distinguished scholars offer a spirited, entertaining, illuminating, thought-provoking, militantly readable, thoroughly persuasive, and much-needed reminder that history is a subgenre of nonfiction literature.”— Carlo Rotella, author of The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

“Our most engaging historians embrace the simplest of messages: show, don’t tell.  These imaginative essays, each a gem, remind us that writing is part of the art of interpreting the past.”— Peter C. Mancall, author of The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England