Category: Formation Essay

Agency is what we seek to understand as historians: the demiurge of that disciplinary holy grail, causality.  Who or what stirs the cauldron of change?  When and how?  When we reflect on our own lives, the elusive nature of that power becomes even more palpable.  How did I become this thing, a historian of modern…

I was born in 1948 and grew up in the north-east of England at a time when its two major industries – mining and shipbuilding – were in decline.  My father had joined the Royal Navy in 1938 as a regular officer.  This was quite an achievement for a working-class Jew.  He served through the…

From about the time I was twelve, my father and I would stay up late during summer nights discussing politics. As an immigrant to the U.S., he focused our conversations around international relations, although I didn’t quite realize it at the time. Our talks ranged from the political to the personal.  I remember clearly a…

I didn’t set out to become a transnational historian, but then again, I’m not sure anyone did in the 1970s. My story begins with women’s history.  In 1969, after my first year at Bryn Mawr College and a summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying French, where I first saw a poster for what was then called…

Many of the essays in the series “Learning the Scholar’s Craft” suggest that for a number of scholars, “learning” depends as much on mentorship, intuition, and luck as it does on the research subjects one pursues.  In this respect, my trajectory was no exception.  When I went to college, I understood very quickly that intellectual…

Growing up on a farm in west-central Illinois, near the town of Augusta where I attended high school, I never imagined that I would become a professor of history at a major university.  My father taught history at a different high school, but I took only the required course in this subject as it was…

At the beginning of my career, I had strong ideas about what I wanted to do and research, none of which outlived the realities I met.  Unexpected adventures, enormous opportunities, huge historical shifts, and serendipitous encounters helped me ‘learn the scholar’s craft.’  The drive of my own intellect may have been the least important factor. …

We should be wary when we look back at our own lives and try to discern a pattern.  Historians know that one of the common fallacies in looking at the past is to assume that things were bound to turn out as they did, to see a chain of causality in what may be random…