Thinking about my poor attitude toward the study of history when I was in high school and college and then realizing how much I love the subject today, I marvel at the fact that it was a handful of books on the subject that caused me to change my mind and make the independent study of American history my most consistent avocation during the last 30 years.

Without a doubt, the one historian who opened my mind to the fascinating and sometimes maddening examination of America’s past more than any other was Bruce Catton. His trilogy of the Union’s Army of the Potomac culminating in the 1954 Pulitzer Prize winning A Stillness at Appomattox along with his other great trilogy A Centennial History of the Civil War (called the best short history of the Civil War ever written), displayed not only a careful and considered historian’s eye for important details but a writing style that brought history to life in a way that few historians have been able to do before or since.

One reviewer wrote ” If every historian wrote like Bruce Catton, no one would read fiction” – a sentiment that I agree with wholeheartedly. The man who succeeded him as editor of American Heritage magazine Oliver Jensen wrote of Catton, “There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”

And that is what drove my interest in history; this almost surreal ability of some historians to take the reader back in time, to bring to life long dead and forgotten heroes and not only show you how they lived but actually place the reader in the shoes of the giants in order to get a feel for why they made the decisions they did. If nothing else, good history is not the study of when or how or what; the best histories answer the question why and allows the reader then to draw their own conclusions about the characters and their times.

The fact that narrative histories like Catton’s are frowned on by the Academy largely because they are sometimes poorly or incompletely sourced as well as failing to illuminate history in a scholarly manner (most academic historians not favoring such a linear approach to the study of history) does nothing to lessen my enjoyment in reading them. And while I respect the academics for their tireless and learned contributions to our national narrative, I believe that at bottom, there is much to be said for viewing history as a storytelling experience. It makes America’s past seem more accessible, more available to we, the consumers of knowledge.

I’m sure each of us has their favorite historians. There are so many good ones (with both left and right “takes” on America’s past) that any list I attempt to compile here would be incomplete. But for myself, the inheritor of Bruce Catton’s mantle of favorite narrative historian has to go to David Hackett Fischer.

Fischer’s books on early America are brilliantly written labors of love. It is clear that Professor Fischer has a deep and abiding respect for our ancestors whose toil and sacrifice made the United States what it is today. Two of his books had a profound affect on me: Paul Revere’s Ride (1994) and Washington’s Crossing (2004), the latter winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for history.

I believe what Bruce Catton was as an historian to the Civil War, Fischer is to early America. With a prose style that is achingly beautiful and a storyteller’s ear for gleaning what would be of most interest to his audience, Fischer has an uncanny ability to draw the reader into the story so that at times, you feel as if you were either a fly on the wall (such as when Washington was holding one of his councils of war with his officers) or, in the case of Revere, riding on the back of his horse as he rode through the night sounding his immortal alarm.

In the March, 2006 on-line edition of The American Enterprise – the monthly publication of The American Enterprise Institute - TAE interviews the historian about a variety of subjects including, how growing up in Baltimore colored his appreciation of history:

A lot of history had happened around Baltimore. I had an aunt who was blind and in her 90s. She told a story to my cousins and my brother and me—it was a big sprawling family—about a July day when from her home on a farm north of Baltimore there was a sound like the wind in the trees. She went outside and there was no wind. She looked up the road and saw a line of wagons as far as she could see. They were the wounded from Gettysburg.

That was told to us when we were very small, and I think that’s the recipe for making a historian. It was the immediacy of those events—the sense that they were happening to us in some way.

Indeed, Catton tells a similar tale of what ignited his passion for history. Being much older (the historian was born in 1899), Catton can recall sitting in front of the general store of his rural Michigan home town and listening to the old veterans of the Civil War talk about their adventures. His quest to tell their story also brings to mind the labors of Stephen Ambrose whose series of books on the men who fought World War II were written with those aging veterans in mind.

Fischer pulls no punches regarding his disdain for some historians on the left who have taken to “moralizing” about America’s past:

I quoted in that book a British historian who said that what British readers want to know about Napoleon is whether he was a good or a bad man. People want that sort of simple answer to a complex question. These people you speak of were very complicated, and we are increasingly getting simple answers to complex judgments of people in the past.

Professor Fischer sees this attitude changing:

Yes, things are changing very rapidly in academe. I think it was partly a generational phenomenon. The generation that came of age in the 1960s is now approaching retirement in the universities, and their children and grandchildren are very different in the way they think about the world. The excesses of these movements always build in their own corrections.

Fischer speaks to the question of the changing nature of how we are looking at America’s founding:

During the 1970s and ’80s, the history sections moved to the back of the bookstore, and other disciplines in the universities cultivated non-historical or even anti-historical ways of thinking: They looked for timeless abstractions in the social sciences, or theoretical models in economics that transcended era and place. Then in the ’90s a sudden change appeared. Econometric history began to flourish. We got new historical movements in literature departments. My colleagues in literature are increasingly writing historically about their subjects. In philosophy, the history of ideas is what’s growing. The most rapidly expanding field in political science is called Politics in History.

I scratch my head about this. Why is it happening? Did people suddenly discover that history was happening to them, via the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or was it a revulsion against those timeless abstractions, those models like Marx and Freud, that didn’t seem to work very well as the world changed? Whatever it was, it’s a thought revolution of profound importance.

Then there’s the special case of the popularity of the Revolution and the early Republic. We’ve been through other periods of popularity of certain fields: World War II in the 1990s and the Civil War in the 1960s. They were driven by anniversaries. The Revolution and early Republic booms are not anniversary-connected.

In the interview, Fischer also reveals several aspects of his personal politics as well as some fascinating thoughts on America today as it relates to America of 300 years ago.

I have yet to read Professor Fischer’s newest effort Liberty and Freedom which deals with those concepts and what they’ve meant to America since her founding. If it is anything like his other works I’ve read, I’m sure to look forward to a few sleepless nights as I take another journey with a master storyteller whose writing whisks us back in time so that we can live the lives of our ancestors and see the world through their eyes.