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I am delighted to announce that my latest book has just been published by Oxford University Press. You can buy a copy here. Here are the opening pages: As soon as the guns had fallen silent on July 3, 1863, Gettysburg became a place of the imagination. The three-day battle fought across the gentle ridges
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This piece appeared in The Sunday Times 4 August 2024 Kamala Harris is expected to name a Democratic running-mate in the coming days. Does it matter who presidential candidates pick? Or are the “veepstakes”, the parlour game beloved of Washington politicos, no more than an entertaining sideshow? Campaigns like to think that a running-mate from
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A version of the following piece appeared in The Sunday Times on December 31, 2023 Presidential election years have often struck Americans as deeply portentous. To Walt Whitman, the self-described “poet of democracy”, 1860 was “the year of meteors” in which “the comet that came unannounced out of the North flaring in heaven” augured a
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A version of the following piece appeared in The Sunday Times, December 23, 2023. It is one minute to midnight for American liberals. For them, the stakes in the 2024 presidential election are no less than the survival of democracy. The Colorado Supreme Court’s bold decision that Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidency because
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This is a lightly edited text of a talk I gave at St. Anne’s College Oxford on 21 September 2019 We live in an age of anxiety – which may well be the default setting for all human societies, but which feels to many of us to be something new. The reasons for the anxiety
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Civil War historians are more rancorous now than for a generation. The reason for this, I think, is that historians who see the war as the inexorable consequence of divisions over slavery are alarmed at the apparent revival of “revisionism” and they want to stamp it out. “Revisionism”, in this context, is a historiographical term
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This is an edited draft of a lecture I have been writing, which in time may grow into a little book about the concept of compromise in American political life from the Revolution to the present day. Compromise must surely be the most ambivalent concept in modern politics. It can be a virtue or a
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This is a piece I wrote for BBC World History Magazine’s September 2017 issue. The whole point of a pedestal is to elevate whatever’s on it. That’s the thing about statues: they demand not just attention but reverence. And because they’re sited in prominent public places, the intention is always to make a statement. That
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Inscribed above the dais in the wood-paneled Gustave Tuck Theatre in University College London is a quotation from Deuteronomy: “Remember the Days of Old; Consider the Years of Each Generation.” It’s a poetic and even rather inspiring injunction but if you think about it too much it’s not obvious how to live up to it.
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The aim of historical writing is to convey complexity with clarity, isn’t it? We know that the world is an infinitely varied and confusing place. Yet we also know that without trying to impose some kind of schema, all we’re left with is anecdote. It can be hard enough, sometimes, to uncover the dots, but
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Recently I made a series for BBC Radio 4 called “Trump: The Presidential Precedents”. It told the stories of six previous US presidents who had won elections by promising to shake up a corrupt establishment and restore government by, or at least for, the little guy. From Andrew Jackson, the first westerner to win, to
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I’ve been working on a radio series about previous presidential elections (to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 every day at 1.45pm in the week beginning January 16) with the aim of providing some historical context for our present political moment (Mr D. Trump, to remind you, if you’d forgotten, will be inaugurated on January
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It’s not surprising that its residents so readily describe Santa Barbara as paradise. On a fertile plain between steeply rising mountains and a sandy, south-facing stretch of the California coast, the city basks in year-round warm sunshine. I was there at the end of January, when the contrast with the wintry chill of London was
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Historians, it seems to me, are temperamentally divided into those who gravitate to the particularities of studying people — and those who want to describe big patterns and large-scale processes of change. For some the fascination of the past is in ultimately in understanding how people lived, thought, coped. For others it is in answering
Adam Smith: Historian 